Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Another bewitching album to waltz from the Vortex Vault, this one evokes cinematic imagery if only because there is less of a focus on vocals here and more emphasis on atmosphere. One of the best things about Liles' music is how it sparks the imagination beyond the scope of intention, and Black Market is no exception.
One of the pioneering noise projects of the genre's early 1980s heyday has returned with a new disc that manages to both push the brutal aspect of their discography to its natural limits while still maintaining an ear for subtlety and depth that tends to be lacking in the realms of harsh electronics.
Sutcliffe Jugend were among the creators of what is now known as power electronics and so called 'noise.' While contemporaries Whitehouse tend to get most of the credit, SJ's Kevin Tomkins' time with that band lead to some of their most violent and brutal tracks. SJ (Tomkins and Paul Taylor) has continued on and off since the early '80s, consistently trying new approaches, from pure noise (everything in the early days) to guitar based experimentation (Death Mask), each reinvention saw the duo trying something different. Following up the twin albums for Cold Meat Industries (When Pornography is No Longer Enough and The Victim As Beauty) was a difficult proposition, given the violence and brutality of those two occasionally reached comedically absurd levels (see: "Come on cunt, show me your fucking titties").
After two side project releases (the more atmospheric and experimental Between Silences and Threnody for the Victims of Ignorance, both as just SJ), Taylor and Tomkins have reinstated the Sutcliffe Jugend moniker, and the new work meshes the brutal elements of those earlier incarnations with the experimentation and compositional subtleties of the SJ work. Do not assume the violence has been overly stifled, however: the subtle musical loops of "What If" belie its violent underpinning and otherwordly vocals, and the instrumental closer "Blind Ignorance" is every bit as torturous as anything else in the duo's canon.
Beyond the harsh noise violence lies a great deal of subtlety and structure though, as well as experimentation. "This Is The Truth" features some nearly melodic, almost gospel like vocals from Tomkins with the pulsating digital noise throughout the track. Even more bizarre, "Obsession," opens with bizarre found sounds with some guitar string treatments and what almost resembles a harpsichord. Something must be said for "Pigboy" as well, one of the most hateful pieces of music I've heard, though I suspect the vocals are intended to be much more cathartic than accusatory.
Lyrically this album is an odd beast. Tomkins' shrieks and screams are often buried in layers of effects so the lyrics are not entirely clear, but an overarching theme of existential philosophy and spirituality/spiritualism seems prominent here, which is of much greater thematic depth than is usually associated with this genre. According to their Web site, a great deal of new activity is planned for the coming months, and this sharp spike in productivity should interest anyone who is a fan of difficult/violent music such as this.
Rubbernecking forum jockeys and slobbering music reviewers alike have all but hailed this record as all but the Second Coming of Techno, with many hastily adding it to their "Best of 2007" lists. For all of its bandwagon hype and post-Detroit sleekness, this self-titled full-length comes off remarkably good but not astonishingly great.
Dispensed in both CD and double LP formats, Phillip Sollman's first album as Efdemin makes frequent, almost casual references to early naughties Force Tracks tech-house as often as more recent Kompakt electronic dance music. Working capably within a manifestly derivative style, Sollman eagerly inches his way towards grand peaks and windswept valleys on "Lohn & Brot." Tracks like "Back To School" are meant to lift the spirits on the dancefloor, utilizing emotive layered sounds replete with carefully crafted hooks.It is abundantly clear how much Sollman adores melody; when trying his hand at asceticism, as with the bleak "Stately, Yes," he can hardly resist nearly four minutes in to let rays of sparkling light burst through.The slowing metamorphosing "Bergwein" adds some of that old school Artificial Intelligence warmth into the mix, while "April Fools" disrupts its own sense of calm with pinprick percussion, militantly rigid stabs, and camera shutter snares.
Founded by a trio of well-regarded producers, Dial rightfully earns considerable respect from anyone following minimal techno and house.Since 2000, the label has output a fair number of memorable releases on vinyl and compact disc, among these one of my favorite albums of the last few years: Pantha Du Prince's superlative Diamond Daze.Fans of that record, his recent follow-up, and the rest of Dial's roster will assuredly find plenty to like in this project, as will those who still romanticize tech-house’s past.Those hoping for a progression worthy of the attention presently being paid to this album, however, will likely find that it's hardly the brilliant masterpiece it's been previously been chalked up as.
Alcorn'spedal steel music has always seemed to be more part of a journey rather than a recording career. Lauded by fellow Houston luminaries Charalambides and Heather Leigh Murray, she delves into the forests of possibility between jazz, improv and her own interpretations/transcriptions of choral work. Alongside other experimental players Alcorn is helping to prising the blackened fingers of Country music’s stranglehold on the Pedal steel.
Olde English Spelling BeeThe extensive liners inside the vinyl’s gorgeous gatefold sleeve talk about hope, but the music offers only glimpses of this. The opener “Heart Sutra” rings out a sleek toned Morse code refrain, a signal to open hearts and minds, but this is the first sides only such moment. The 16 minute title track keeps to a darker and more discouraging path, single notes subtly warping into something that’s peculiarly of the other. As the sleeve notes point out, Alcorn uses other parts of instrument to generate different pitches, the ends of strings providing deeper and damper notes. At times her performance sounds like that of a stoned and lost 12 string player, Alcorn going for melodic parts while her hands instead subconsciously transcribe her worry and anguish.
The second side’s four tracks keep up the clear recorded sound but the playing seems softly and delicately deranged. A dark mood tries to cast itself over the rest of the record, an air of desolation in the line of wrong spiralling notes. But despite this negativity, the songs seem to find a stasis by balancing the forces of bleakness and strength, repeated listens revealing strength in the minimalism. Its surprising how someone who uses notes as sparingly ends up wrapping the album in such confusion, it’s an unusual ride. It might not be too long for that resurrection that Susan Alcorn's waiting for.
Mark Dwinell's second album as Nonloc finds him mining the work of minimalist composers for inspiration. Well-performed and exquisitely recorded, the album is a refined and contemplative exercise in repetition.
Apparently quite enamored of composers like Reich, Glass, and Riley, Dwinell uses repetition in much the same way as they do but with instruments like acoustic guitars, banjos, and mandolins rather than orchestral or symphonic instruments. It's a nice effect, but it gets dull after a while, especially since this type of music is fairly static, lacking any peaks or valleys to give a sense of movement. Also, considering that these basic ideas were already developed and popularized by others many years ago makes them a little less significant. However, when Dwinell imparts something of himself through the use of his vocals, the songs take off.
Using repetition as a compositional tool rather than a foreground element serves Dwinell's singing well, as evidenced on songs like "Candide," the playful "Sentry at Eleusis," and the sublime "Lost In the Desert, Near Death." To be fair, there are a few instrumentals in the vein of his heroes that add something different to their work, like the jazz-inflected "My Song Before the Gates" or the polyrhythmic "Processional," but for the most part, Dwinell's songs work better when he puts aside his obvious influences. There's still plenty of beauty to be found on this album, even if some of it sounds vaguely like things I've heard before.
This Portland, Oregon group alternates between folk songs and quasi-mystical drones on its fourth album and performs both styles fairly well. Yet they're at their best when they combine the two, which is something they don't do nearly enough here. Still, this album has several transcendent moments of note.
Calling the album Photosynthesis is pretty obvious for a band named Plants, and unfortunately most of the song titles similarly lack poetry. Convenient rather than descriptive titles like "Seedling," "Roots," and "Tumbleweed" stretch the concept a little too thin. Usually this wouldn't bother me, but I also had difficulty determining exactly what the group is trying to express, and these titles didn't help. I suspect a certain reverence for the plant kingdom and its structural parts because of the gravity of the atmospheric instrumentals on the album, yet I don't really get a sense of why the group honors these things. Titles less generic would have gone a long way toward providing a context for these ideas. Even so, I did like quite a bit of the material here.
The lush and gorgeous opening title track is a great introduction, and equally compelling is the hazy "Roots." "Seedling," one of the few tracks with vocals, has a pleasant vibe and melody. On the other hand, "Seedling Two" isn't particularly memorable, nor is "Tumbleweed," apart from some unusual banjo playing. My favorite track is easily "Seedling Three" because it best incorporates the group's folk and drone tendencies, making it the album's most fully realized song. An album of others like these would have been stunning, but instead the group comes just shy of making something truly remarkable.
Legendary culture jam-band Negativland announces upcoming release of My Favorite Things DVD (complete with doo-wop covers CD by the 180 Gs) and reissue of its 1983 conceptual masterpiece, A Big 10-8 Place.
Group launches first East Coast tour in seven years with a Time Out New York profile and performance at NYC’s Highline Ballroom.
Declared heroic by their peers for refashioning culture into what the group considers to be more honest statements, Negativland suggests that refusing to be original, in the traditional sense, is the only way to make art that has any depth within commodity capitalism... – The New York Times
Twisted genius...compelling...parody and satire as a grass roots weapon of consumer resistance. – Rolling Stone
Negativland isn't just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling. – The Onion
Negativland’s greatest hits become all new moving pictures in the amazing and long awaited DVD release of My Favorite Things, to be issued via the Other Cinema (Sonic Outlaws, So Wrong They’re Right) imprint on October 23rd. Years in the making, this package is an epic career-capping project from Negativland. Sure to please the group’s old fans, this very accessible DVD is also an incredible introduction to Negativland's work for new ones. Created with a crew of 18 other experimental filmmakers from all over the USA, Our Favorite Things is a collaborative project that takes a striking visual leap into the same legally gray area that Negativland has been exploring with sound for the last 27 years. A dark and charming film collection of unforgettable collage and classic cut-up entertainment for all ages, it also comes with over 90 minutes of bonus material, as well as a truly silly and bizarre 18-minute bonus CD of 100% acapella versions of Negativland's work by The 180 Gs, a five-person black acapella group from Detroit, that has endeavored to “cover” Negativland’s cut up collage work in R 'n B, Doo-Wop, and Gospel styles. The resulting album 180 D’Gs To The Future! is extremely fun, funny, and very weird.
Also in the works is the long awaited re-issue of Negativland's legendary 1983 difficult listening conceptual suburban epic A Big 10-8 Place. Over three years in the making, and with ten-thousand-million-billion analog tape splices, this insanely cut-up and uniquely weird release remains the hands down favorite of many fans of Negativland's work. This re-issue, due out on September 25th, comes with a 60-minute bonus DVD of Negativland's No Other Possibility video, created in the mid-1980’s.
As if all of this Negativland activity weren’t enough to cause a government reaction, the band will bring a new version of its weekly radio broadcast (“Over the Edge” – on the air since 1981) to the live stage, mixing music, found sounds, found dialog, scripts, personalities, and sound effects within a “radio” theater-of-the-mind. Time Out New York featured the band this week in anticipation of its first New York City performance since a sold-out show at Irving Plaza in 2000 (LINK). “It's All In Your Head FM” is a two-hour-long, action-packed look at monotheism, the supernatural God concept, and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. Dr. Oslo Norway is your “radio” host, and Christianity and Islam are the featured religions, as Negativland asks you to contemplate some complex, serious, silly, and challenging ideas about human belief in this audio cut-up mix best described as a “documentary collage”. “It's All In Your Head FM” is a compelling and uniquely fun presentation of sticky theological concepts, which has actually been known to provoke arguments for days after the show is over.
Opening the NYC performance will be two other significant contributors to the history of re-appropriation of found sounds – Steinski and Double Bee. In 1983, Tommy Boy Records held a promotional contest, in which entrants were asked to remix the single “Play That Beat, Mr. D.J.” by G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid (members of Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force). The entry submitted by Steinski and Double Dee, “Lesson 1 — The Payoff Mix” was packed with sampled appropriations from other records -- not only from early Hip-Hop records and from Funk and Disco records that were popular with Hip-Hop DJs, but with short snippets of older songs by Little Richard and The Supremes, along with vocal samples from sources as diverse as instructional tap-dancing records and Humphrey Bogart films.
Double Dee and Steinski followed up this success with “Lesson 2 — The James Brown Mix” in 1984, which began with a sample from The War of The Worlds before quickly running through a montage of memorable breaks from classic James Brown records, with sampled appearances by Dirty Harry and Bugs Bunny.
In 1985 came “Lesson 3 — The History of Hip-Hop Mix” which attempted a survey of the great breakdancing favorites, along with snippets from Johnny Carson and Hernando's Hideaway. The Illegal Art label, home to notorious musical collage artist Girl Talk will issue a definitive compilation of this long unavailable material in 2008.
Negativland Live:
08/02 New York, NY Highline Ballroom (tune in live at www.free103point9.org ) 08/03 Philadelphia, PA International House 08/04 Baltimore, MD The Church on St. Paul St. 08/05 Washington DC Warehouse Theater 08/07 Charlottesville, VA Satellite Ballroom
“Negativland, longtime advocates of fair use allowances for pop media collage, are perhaps America's most skilled plunderers from the detritus of 20th century commercial culture. Negativland are media addicts who see society suffering under a constant barrage of TV, canned imagery, advertising and corporate culture...the band's latest project is razor sharp, microscopically focused, terribly fun and a bit psychotic. – Wired
“Brutally hilarious...a compelling argument for the anti-copyright movement.” – Village Voice
“Fearless artistes or foolhardy risk-takers.... by constantly haranguing the audience with authentic advertising spiel and highlighting its transparency, they kill the messenger, kill the message and produce highly entertaining art simultaneously. – L.A. Weekly
Since 1980, the four or five Floptops known as Negativland have been creating records, fine art, video, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture, Negativland re-arranges these bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural opposition and “culture jamming” (a term coined by Negativland in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
Okay, but what, you still ask, is Negativland exactly? That's hard to answer. Negativland definitely isn't a “band,” though they may look like one when you see their CDs for sale in your local shopping mall. They're more like some sort of goofy yet serious European-style artist/activist collective - an unhealthy mix of John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Pink Floyd, Bruce Connor, Firesign Theatre, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Rauschenberg, 1970's German electronic music, old school punk rock attitude, surrealist performance art, your high school science teacher…and lot's more.
Over the years Negativland's “illegal” collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, artistic and humorous critiques of mass media and culture, and, of course, so-called “culture jamming” (a term now thoroughly and somewhat distastefully commodified by Adbusters Magazine.)
While they have been, since getting sued, aggressively and publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation's copyright laws, and are often perceived as creative and funny shit-stirring anti-corporate activists, Negativland are artists first and activists second, not the other way around. Their art and media interventions have (often naively) posed questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda and perception, with the results of these questions and explorations being what they release to the public. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about in over 30 books (including No Logo by Naomi Klein, Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff, and various biographies of the band U2), cited in legal journals, and they often lecture about their work here and in Europe.
In 1995 Negativland released a 270 page book with 72 minute CD entitled Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. This book documented their infamous four-year long legal battle over their 1991 release of an audio piece entitled U2. They were the subjects of Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature documentary Sonic Outlaws. Negativland also created the soundtrack and sound design for Harold Boihem's 1997 documentary film The Ad and The Ego, an excellent in-depth look into the hidden agendas of the corporate ad world that goes very deep into the gross and subtle ways that we are adversely affected by advertising.
Negativland is interested in unusual noises and images (especially ones that are found close at hand), unusual ways to restructure such things and combine them with their own music and art, and mass media transmissions which have become sources, and subjects, of much of their work. Negativland covets insightful wackiness from anywhere, low-tech approaches whenever possible, telling humor, and vital social targets of any kind. Without ideological preaching, Negativland often becomes a subliminal culture sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren't supposed to notice.
A complete discography of Negativland's work is available at the band’s website.
There are few, if actually any, musical series’ at the moment as interesting as Jandek’s chronological live releases. With his twenty five year old ‘Texan loner’ tag finally being shed, his live releases are revealing a whole experience to fans of his disturbingly bare vocal/guitar confessions. After the indifferent Austin Sunday release, Jandek seems to have taken some wise soul’s advice, getting players with improvisational chops in instead of local backroom bums.
Backed by Chris Corsano on drums, Matt Heyner on bass and Loren Connors on guitar, the oddly subtitled ‘Afternoon of Insensitivity’ (odd because Jandek sounds anything but insensitive over these two discs) is his most composed sounding set to date. Jandek spends the LP away from his customary live set-up of electric guitar and sits behind the staple instrument of sanctum seekers, the organ (well, a Korg synth set to organ). He certainly seems able to express himself more traditionally through this instrument, as opposed to his signature untrained guitar style. This trio of musicians collude in a mutual conspiracy to shelter and protect Jandek from slipping into skeletal soloisms, perhaps overexposing the natural spookiness of the organ. Loren Connors plays out of his self, his guitar opening up in liquid swirls, his pedals spreading sound across the show in great strokes.
The rhythm section moves steadily in the footsteps of the organ, much of Corsano’s playing like pensive, beautiful footsteps beneath Connors and Jandek. His role feels more obviously rhythmic than Alex Neilson’s drumming work on three of the previous live releases, snare shots like candle points in the fog. Vocally, there’s an initial surprise as he actually sounds unsure about what he’s saying, perhaps even a little shy. Though why Jandek should choose his fiftieth album to get all reticent on us is anyone’s guess. This slip doesn’t last long though (stage fright?) and soon he’s back to his undulant matter of fact confessions. It’s interesting to see that brief glimpse of something behind the impassive mask, Jandek normally ignoring the crowd’s presence beyond a few rare recorded smiles. Manhattan Tuesday follows the usual lyrical routes, the sheer strength of his imagery and questions always overcoming his dependence on the themes of isolation, alienation and lost love. Its beginning to really feel like Jandek has been slowly becoming more capable of accurately describing his incipient awareness of the internal world.
Scuttlebutt around the intertubes is that no, this is not the product of one "Karen Tregaskin" discovered via a Myspace site, but actually good ol' Richard D. James. Regardless of its pedigree, it's a nice slab of throwback electro that is as fascinating for nostalgic reasons as it is for its overall listening value.
From the look and sound of this disc, it certainly could be an Aphex Twin related project, from the abstract song titles, ultra minimal packaging, and an overwhelming playful, yet complex arrangement of analog synths. However, the sound sticks closer to his AFX moniker, where rather than spastic programming and stuttering drums, the sound is much more indebted to early 1980s electro and Detroit techno. The Tuss wear his/her/their nostalgia openly on "Synthacon 9," where an intentionally stiff 808 drum track is augmented with synth lines that could have been stolen from Prince circa 1982, along with a bit of playful reverb thrown in for good measure. Other than the more contemporary drum & bass elements that seep in towards the end, this could very easily be a 25 year old track. "Shiz Ko E" is another treat for the older folks, fragments of Commodore 64 synthetic speech, acid house sequences, and a pitch bent synth line straight from the backrooms of the Kool and the Gang compound.
The disc doesn't rely solely on memories of sweaty 80’s clubs though, there are a good deal of tracks that show more current elements as well. "Last Rushup 10 F" has the hyperspeed breakbeats that are expected in this day in age, but keeps things grounded with actual melodies, vocoder synths, and more playful applications of reverb, which is never a bad thing. Breakbeats of a more jazzy variety (think Squarepusher) also show up on "Rushup I Bank 12" with cheap computer sound effects and even a bit of lounge-y piano to go along with the 303 squelch.
Whether this is actually Richard D. James or not is somewhat irrelevant, because it is a damn good disc of old school techno that manages to bring up the nostalgia of the early days without sounding too dated or insincere. One can at least hope that The Tuss makes up for the lack of productivity from a certain Rephlex label head, hint hint.
"Northern’s debut offering, another in Infraction’s sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience, are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes, and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It’s the New Quiet.
The album opens with “Coasting” in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil (Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf. the later “Pacific”). The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358, Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating – at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scatter and a cushion for repose. No fear of Northern exposure here at the warmer end of digital, gently meshing textures, lapping into laptop. It’s a deceptively small sound that can get big on you, like on “Migrate”, which dwells in semi-stasis just long enough to lull, then spills over with swells before slipping out of sight. Drawn’s digital means of generation takes on an increasingly naturalistic sounding aspect helped by its manipulated guitar-enriched intake. The guitar tradition drawn on Drawn is the ostinato introspections and plucked intimacies of 1 mile North, Labradford, and Dan Abrams. Ostensibly different from Infraction stable signature sound, it somehow sits comfortably within it.
The first 150 copies come bountifully endowed with a bonus cd-r, Jessa (INFX 025), a collection which signals the next phase in Northern development, though the seeds of Jessa’s future-indicative are retievable from Drawn’s present-past. It evidences a deeper denser dronier zone-out music, minimizing digital intervention and renouncing microsonic patter. The gestures here are towards a half-light almost-orchestralism, moving from the likes of Marsen Jules and the secular sacral of Eluvium, shoulder-to-shoulder with the submersible slowcore starriness of The Lid (whose time of greatest influence and recognition has finally now come). Sidenote: Northern bid their myspace visitors: “be quiet with us.” More resonances of SotL, and their “Be Little with Me”? Sshhh. It’s Northern. It’s the New Quiet." (A. Lockett) Comes housed in Stoughton style mini-lp gatefold sleeve. Down to 10 copies of the limited edition!
This set marks the end of Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdles' marriage and musical collaboration. 30 Year Low is a terrific document of the death of love, the inevitability of aging, and is proof positive that in all musical genres, quality matters more than anything else.
This is a sophisticated album invested with personal conviction. The Mendoza Line handle the subject matter (bars, bedrooms, heartbreaks and fears), and the unadorned old-school instrumentation (guitars, bass drums, piano) with a masterful aplomb that lifts 30 Year Low above the average alt-country rock. Mixing the personal and political, the opening track "Since I Came" is sung from the perspective of a pregnant immigrant laborer at a chicken factory in the backwoods of Georgia. Her husband has been killed, possibly murdered, leaving her to survive with their two daughters. The song shuffles along, sad and subtle, but the smell of feathers and the fear of unwanted sexual attention are overwhelming. McArdle’s voice captures feelings of being undocumented and vulnerable, lonely and fleetingly suicidal, before emerging defiant and determined: "Could I find my way out/ Could my two girls grow up to be free/ If you ever touch a hair on their heads/ If you ever look at them the way you do me." "Since I Came" could stand as a companion piece to Merry Men, Carolyn Chute's book about ordinary people discarded by President Reagan's voodoo economics.
"Aspect Of An Old Maid" is a splendid mid-tempo duet, on which the accusatory insights pick up. It has an old-fashioned quality stemming from the decorous harmonica and a words-to-the-bar ratio that was not even "the future of rock and roll" circa 1975. Disgust and contempt have never sounded so much fun as on "31 Candles," which takes the album up another gear. On this song, McArdle spits in the face of infidelity, naivety, and music biz bullshit. The words of Hunter S. Thompson come to mind: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
When couples split up there is a tendency for friends to think they must choose sides and which person to stay in touch with. To my ears, Shannon McArdle's voice is the more versatile, and the way she sings the word "fuck" is very endearing. After "I Lost My Taste," Timothy Bracy's drawl was really getting on my nerves and I was certain that McArdle would be the only one I would listen to in future. It was a surprise then, that Bracy's slow composition "Love On Parole" turned out to be a highlight. Mainly accompanying his voice with piano and sparse drumming, he dissects the rearrangements, truces, terms and conditions which lovers go through in a relationship. The song is part confessional, part ode to uncomplicated lust, part verbose rationale, but wholly convincing and sad.
Released along with the mini-album is The Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent: a bonus disc of live tracks, radio appearances, rehearsal takes, covers, and demos. The pale renditions of other people's breakup songs from some classic albums, demonstrate that The Mendoza Line sound best when communicating in the pace, tone and cadence of their own inner voices, (though on 30 Year Low they do a fine version of the late Jimmy Silva's "Tell It To The Raven"). The willful sloppiness will appeal to those who enjoy the warts-and-all approach or who simply must hear them clump through Cole Porter or Richard Thompson's "Withered And Died." I wish it had been released separately, because 30 Year Low has an almost perfect balance of hurt and toughness, care and humor, spunk and weariness, literal and metaphorical. Sweetly, neither songwriter hogs the credits. McArdle and Bracey bring equal craft and humanity to their songs, whether they are rowdy, angry, gentle, bitter, or lewd. This is a smart, beautiful, and harmonious record, all the more poignant with the knowledge that they are at the very point of breaking up.