What Else [Are They] Supposed To Do?

NoFX - Wolves in Wolves' Clothing

Fat Wreck Chords, 2006

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I remember being in high school, loving NoFX's most recent release So Long and Thanks for all the Shoes. I mentioned it to some older kids who were wearing Blink-182 T-shirts. They sort of snortled and said that NoFX hadn't come out with a good one since Punk in Drublic.

And now they keep coming out with new albums. And now, though I'm sort of tired of their new albums, and none of them have the catchiness or memorability of their old ones, I try really hard to respect the fact that they are still going. And the music does grow on me over time. It has on their last couple of albums.

With that said, this is just more NoFX. The songs are different but the feel is the same. Every once in a while they mix it up, but sort of in a predictable way. Like the last few albums, the songs seem to have been written over the last year and a half. They have their usual clever wit. The same decent but standard production (with the recent flair of having a couple of purposefully badly recorded songs, just for the sake of it). The same cocky fun with a subversive but obvious political slant. It seems to be getting old.

And that's the conundrum bands face. Every aging band has to make an important choice, either to change and piss off the loyal fanbase, or stay true to their sound and get stale. People who liked Metallica's early work hate their recent work. On the other hand, how many times did AC/DC record the same crap over and over again?

There are some melodies on Wolves that I can hum along to. And after enough listens, I'll have the words in my head. And then one day I'll find myself humming a song or two, and I'll go back and listen to it. And that's good. Because in the end, it's just more NoFX, and that's really not all that bad of a thing.

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(and yes, the title of this entry did come from lyrics from the album.)

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EDIT: almost a month after posting all this, I've come to consider this NoFX album a classic. It's pretty much on par with So Long and Thanks For All the Shoes. Good work, NoFX.

Swans and Angels

Swans - Children of God/World of Skin

Young God, 1987 - '88

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Angels of Light - Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home

Young God, 2003

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Children of God/World of Skin: This beast of a 2-part album goes into the stereo and all I can think is "holy shit, it all makes sense now." I've been an Angels of Light junkie for a few months now. I can't escape it. The way the songs don't have to have anything happen in order to work. The way the music is a mood and a melody and the layers and the echoing poetry and all of it just overwhelms me.

That's what this album is. Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home: Poetry spread out over chords and rythyms. Melody is secondary but inherent. The repition seems to deepen the impact of everything without getting too, well, repetitious (New Mother, on the other hand, has a tendency to grind and drag a bit in comparison). When the melody is strpped away and the same notes work over and over, everything sort of clicks. It's like trance for people who like to hear real strings and vocals with thought.

And the vocals! If I were a woman I'm sure I'd get wet as Gira drags his voice across the floor. As a dude, I'm only allowed to get weak-kneed and wish I could stretch my vocal cords so loose. He sounds grand without coming across as self-indulgent, which I guess is one of the hang-ups his music confronts anyway. He sounds like the villian with the deep laugh, only you never really care about the villian as much as you care about Gira. There's a fair amount of that from-the-depths-of-the-crypt chanting and the rest of the Angels join in to offer backup when more support would come in handy.

And I want more.

So I get Filth/Body to Body, Job to Job. It's all noise. It sounds like an even more thrashy and moody Big Black, and that confuses me. Instead of the deep and scratchy voice crooning over layers of atmosphere, I hear hollering about three yalps away from Gibby Hayes's early squeals. It's loud and not textured every song pretty much sounds the same.

The first track of Children of God seems like it could come from Filth, only something is different. There's more there. The sound quality is better. The vocals are the same, only under control. There are layers. Layers! It draws me in.

Jarboe must have brought some magic to the Swans. Suddenly there's really something beautiful here. It's reflective. It's dark. There's space between notes that are filled with feedback and ambient hums, but everything is backed off far enough to really let the band and the singers breathe. And through the ambience comes intensity and beauty.

I can make out the words and I can tell that it's full of thought. Sex, worship, destruction, adoration, malice. Gira shows that he can really pull across a deep, droning bass. At times it's too much for him, but it's great to see it develop in him.

And this is it. This is that link between early Swans - grinding and noisy and destructive, and the Angels of Light - with their layered, poetic, droning and distant reflections of a world that isn't right but isn't wrong

Icing on a Cake

Cake - Fashion Nugget

Volcano (Capricorn), 1996

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Not only is this album good, but it's charming, too. It's unique. It rocks. It's calm and it has groove. Cake is one of the very few bands that seem to have created a genre completely on their own and then managed to stay there all alone for over ten years. While Motorcade of Generosity, their first album, certainly wasn't bad, it was Fashoin Nugget where Cake really solidified, matured, and gained enough ground to feel comfortable singing and playing cocky songs (and actually deserve to as well).

Freshman year of high school, and I'm sitting in a wasted band class with Josh and Rick my high school friends, talking about maybe joining BMG by peeling out and licking and sticking like twelve of those little stickers with pictures of albums on them. I already had Sublime and Stone Temple Pilots and Tripping Daisy and Green Day. Josh said something about me maybe liking Cake, and then Rick argued with him about how Cake sucks.

Then a year later, I borrowed Rick's copy of Fashion Nugget that he had since grown to love. Instant classic. Instant freaking classic. Here's why.

The Mix: This album is mixed well. It's simple with enough layers that there are actually details to listen for. It's full of space instead of mashed in crunchy guitars or seeping in electronic keyboards. The guitar is pushed waaay back so you can hear everything else, and it's all scratchy like nothing you've ever heard for rythym or lead. There's enough space that you can hear past the melody and really hear everything that's going on.

The Performance: This is before Cake relied on electronic beats, so everything sounds sort of live, giving a feel that the performers are actually reacting to each other. Yeah, cohesion. The bassist is stellar and instantly recognizeable. He's all over the place except outside of the chord. The guitars have soul and funk and rock and country and really whatever feel is really needed while retaining a signature sound and feel. Influences span the whole of music but create something singular and bizarely unique.

The Vocals: Cake's music, even their later, blippy, thumpy, buzzy music, really relies on vocals to pull everything through. McCrea has a way of slicing through melodies and time to give you an idea of what he should be singing. "Excessive vamping," the Music Genome Project calls it.

The Lyrics: It has always bugged me that Allmusic.com's totally negative review refers to the lyrics as "Sophomoric jokes that rely on self-consciously elaborate wordplay." They seem to think that Cake has a superiority complex. Turns out they were just trying to entertain. Besides, who else would use phrases like "surene, translucent lake" or "an ancient radiation that haunts dismembered constellations?" And it's imagery. That's a poetry thing. The words he uses convey ideas not explicity stated, but are instead hinted at. It's not a sin to sound smart or creative. Or should they be singing "Hot Legs" and using the word baby as often as possible?

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At first I didn't really know what to say about this album. I like it so much that there's no chance of hearing it anew and objectively. So there it is.

I never could figure out why my parents don't like Fashion Nugget. They should. They really don't know what they're missing.