Of Montreal: Live theatrics no staged act (Boston Phoenix, 9/7/10)

Of Montreal came into being in the late ’90s, when so-called alternative music was entering a period of fallow commercial bloat that followed the pop overthrow of 1991 — The Year That Grunge Broke.

“Alternative” was in many ways a reaction to the outlandish extremes of ’80s culture, from the Day-Glo synthetic-ness of new wave to the eyelinered leather tease of hair metal. Like late-’70s punk repudiating disco and prog-rock, early-’90s rock was a roots-return maneuver, and a relatively austere one at that, as a generation of youngsters became interested in music-biz ethics and flannel accouterments. Which of course made the stage spectacle of Of Montreal in particular and the Elephant 6 collective in general seem all the more jarring. Barnes and company have always filled their albums to the brim with insanity — but for many of their fans, it is the band’s live show, flamboyant and bizarre, that’s kept them coming back.

“In the early years especially, the live show had been a real thrown-together hodge-podge,” Barnes points out. “There were a lot of ideas, but they weren’t very refined. It would be like, ‘Okay, these pigs will come out on stage, and then this man with a gas mask will come out and gas them all, and then a cowboy will come and shoot them all’ — but it was all thrown together like a Benny Hill sketch.”

The past tense there suggests that for the False Priest tour, the band are looking to class up their act. “Well, sort of,” Barnes qualifies. “This record is really cinematic, and so while it was being made, I was thinking very visually, and we’ve been brainstorming this production for months. It’s become an intricate process, coming up with visuals and theatricals and dancers for every song.”

Which is still a far cry from the lumberjack dress code that prevailed through so much of ’80s and ’90s indie. (Even if there was a freak-flag strain in there, whether it was the Butthole Surfers’ surgery videos and topless go-go dancer amid drug-fueled mayhem or the playtime carny juvenilia of the latter-day Flaming Lips.) For Barnes, it’s all about finding a way to express “a powerful positive energy. I mean, I’ve been really into Parliament and Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder, and I just love the freedom that those artists have. They just sort of stuck their ass out and didn’t care. It’s just about allowing yourself to just be, just celebrating all things in life without being full of insecurity.”

Shellac: A Steve Albini vitriol sampler (Boston Phoenix, 8/31/10)

Big Black

The Steve Albini of today is a relatively jovial figure: hard-working, straight-talking, practical — but with the contented air of one who’s been able to find his own way in a tricky field. So why is it that if you Google “Albini” + “asshole,” you get nearly half a million hits? It might have something to do with the fact that, as a snarky occasional ‘zine contributor in the ’80s and early ’90s, Albini said what everyone else was afraid to say, in a manner anything but delicate. I’m sure he would cringe at seeing these selections in print again — but for the erudition of our younger readers, here are four reasons people still approach the man with trepidation:

1. JUST BECAUSE HE RECORDS A BAND DOESN’T MEAN HE LIKES THEM |To Forced Exposure magazine, he described Surfer Rosa, the 1988 Pixies album he’d engineered, as “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock.” (He later admitted to regretting this statement.)

2. HE HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN THE MOST POLITICALLY CORRECT PUNDIT | In a 1992 Maximum Rock and Roll interview, he described the experience of being courted by Depeche Mode, who were eager to have him man the boards of their next album: “At the time, I had never even heard them, so I went to go see them at this big sports arena in London. After about two songs, I thought that ‘this is horrible, these guys are the worst. What are these young homosexuals doing?’ So I just split and told them that they had the wrong guy.”

3. HE IS NOT A FAN OF NON-ANALOG RECORDING METHODS (OR CDS) | As he so eloquently stated back in 1987, at the height of the shoulder-padded days of DAT tapes and banks of electronic effects chains, “The future belongs to analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

4. HE WAS NOT INCLINED TO EXPLAIN OR DEFEND THE OCCASIONAL SHOCKING LYRICS HE PENNED IN BIG BLACK | From the 1992 liner notes of the posthumously released 1987 live album Pig Pile: “Anybody who thinks we overstepped the playground perimeter of lyrical decency (or that the public has any right to demand ‘social responsibility’ from a goddamn punk-rock band) is a pure natural dolt, and should step forward and put his tongue up my ass.”

The Stooges: Getting into the mix– three more that fans want raw (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

Raw Power is viewed by many as one of the all-time great rock albums — but its hyper-trebly, David Bowie–mixed brittleness has been almost as infamous as the musical mayhem on the wax. At first, the band self-produced the record. James Williamson explains, “Our management was busy breaking David Bowie in America, they weren’t paying any attention to us. So we got to make the album without any adult supervision. But they finally heard it and said, ‘This isn’t gonna fly,’ so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it. Bowie came over to LA on some days off from his US tour and did it — and you know, I have to say, he really took a bizarre approach to the mix.”

The ensuing decades saw the album’s legend grow, with an endless parade of bootlegs purporting to offer the “real” mix before Ziggy Stardust had got his bass-stifling hands on it. In 1997, Sony reissued a “definitive” version overseen by Pop himself, an overblown monster that hit the ceiling of digital distortion. Fans who’d lived with the Bowie mix and their bootlegs for decades were irate. Williamson and Ron Asheton were both openly critical.

This year’s remaster of the Bowie mix puts a sheen on the original vinyl release — but for most fans, agreeing to disagree is just part of loving Raw Power. “If it was up to me,” says Williamson, “I’d just release all the tracks and let whoever buys the album mix it for themselves. I mean, why are we arguing about this for 30 years?” Amen, James — but aren’t arguments part and parcel of being an obsessive rock fan? With that in mind, let’s look at three more of rock’s most controversial mixing jobs:

THE BEATLES | LET IT BE [1970] | Near the end of their seven-year dynasty, the Beatles’ January 1969 attempt at a return-to-roots album flamed out in confusion and miles of magnetic tape. Wall-of-sound producer Phil Spector fashioned the spaghetti into a hit album, but with tacked-on string sections and other cheesy touches that rubbed fans the wrong way for decades — until a Spector-less version of the album, Let It Be . . . Naked, was released in 2003, sans cheese.

METALLICA | . . . AND JUSTICE FOR ALL [1988] | Metallica rebounded from the death of bassist Cliff Burton with this double-platter breakthrough album thanks to the crossover hit “One.” But amid the MTV adulation, many fans noticed a distinct lack of bass guitar. Perhaps the band were just hazing new member Jason Newstead, but whatever the cause, fans still wonder whether there isn’t some kind of alternate mix that includes an audible low end.

NIRVANA | IN UTERO [1993] | Kurt Cobain and company’s choice of Steve Albini to record what would be their final studio album seemed a logical choice, especially with Cobain wanting to avoid a repeat of the grunge-o-matic sheen that Butch Vig had left on their previous multi-platinum long-player. But the tracks the band brought back from their Minnesota sojourn did not please the label overlords. As Cobain put it, “The grown-ups don’t like it.” Nirvana eventually remixed a few tracks after Geffen’s consternation crumbled their resolve.

Die Antwoord: Faux Rock? (Boston Phoenix, 7/20/10)

Ironlung

Are Die Antwoord a “fake band”? If they were, they’d be the latest in a long line from the Archies to Spinal Tap to the Dukes of Stratosphear. But they are a real band, just one with fake personae. Here are three other performers who weren’t afraid to step through the mirror and be someone else:

CHRIS GAINES | That Garth Brooks created an alter ego to promote his album of non-country alterna-pop is bizarre enough. But when you factor in his status as the most successful solo artist of all time, his need to obfuscate his identity and hide behind a soul patch and a hairpiece in order to promote his 1999 album The Life of Chris Gaines is nothing short of bewildering. He played SNL as Gaines and had plans to make a CG movie — but Garth fans didn’t see the whole thing as the clever commentary on fame and identity that Brooks intended, assuming instead (correctly?) that he’d lost his mind.

HUMPTY HUMP | Gregory Jacobs, a/k/a Shock G, was an accomplished producer and founder of Digital Underground when he came up with Humpty Hump, a cartoonish buffoon who raps while wearing a Groucho Marx glasses-and-nose get-up. Humpty was just the latest in a long line of Shock G’s alter egos in 1990, when the Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance” became an out-of-nowhere worldwide hit, skyrocketing Hump to the big time — and necessitating a separate identity and backstory for Edward Ellington Humphrey III, as well as stand-ins at live shows to preserve the illusion.

IRONLUNG | Down-tuned rumbling stoner crew Scissorfight assaulted an unsuspecting Boston scene throughout the late ’90s and early ’00s. Their shtick was a strange fixation on New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” northern-redneck culture, one made visceral by the shock tactics of frontman Ironlung, a/k/a Newton-born Chris Shurtleff. A hulking behemoth with an impressive beard, Shurtleff hatched the idea of Ironlung during his college stint in Keene, where the appeal of New Hampshire’s outlaw wilderness opened his eyes and mind. But Ironlung the untamed savage was indeed a persona: during the band’s reign of terror, Shurtleff the real person quietly earned a masters from UMass. His thesis? “On Acid: Exploring Representations of LSD Experimentation.”

Dex Romweber: Two For The Road: A History of Rock Duos (Boston Phoenix, 6/24/10)

It isn’t too surprising anymore to see just two people stumble onto a stage and put on a show, whether it’s Lightning Bolt or No Age or Sleigh Bells — there are countless duos out there. After all, when you can fit your music into an already-accepted, stripped-down, garage-rock æsthetic and/or back your two live musicians with an orchestra of virtual hired guns thanks to backing tracks and MIDI-synched accompaniment, who needs more people? But when Dex and his Flat Duo Jets were doing it, the duo thing was still pretty novel. Sure, there were bands with only two real members, but these — from Steely Dan to Tears for Fears to Sparks — were generally songwriting partnerships that employed back-up musicians. That said, the Flat Duo Jets were hardly the first two-piece rock band. Here are four other acts who proved that sometimes, all it takes is two:

SILVER APPLES | When drummer Danny Taylor and synth player Simeon Coxe (who played a homemade synth he dubbed the Simeon) burst onto the East Village underground in 1967, they become forerunners of minimalist electronic music, krautrock, and even punk, all while participating in the then-current psychedelic scene. With a sound built around bracing rhythm and fearsome audio oscillators, Taylor and Coxe didn’t need additional accompaniment.

RANDY HOLDEN | Holden was already a vet of numerous West Coast garage/proto-metal acts (most famously, late-’60s power trio Blue Cheer) when he put together his two-person act in 1969 with drummer Chris Lockheed. An amplifier sponsorship had Holden blasting through multiple Sunn 200 Watt-ers, and the ensuing album, appropriately titled Population II, is a landmark in two-person heaviness.

METHOD ACTORS | Not every two-piece went for full-volume Armageddon. Vic Varney and David Gamble blazed a trail of jittery, dancy post-punk in this early-’80s duo. With basic guitar-bass-drums combinations and almost no sonic manipulation, Varney and Gamble worked strange, impassioned vocals and frantic rhythm into their infernal songcraft, producing a string of crucial singles and EPs and, eventually, their classic 1981 debut long-player, Little Figures.

GODHEADSILO | This Fargo duo couldn’t have been more out of step with the grungetastic flannel rocking of the early ’90s. Channeling their love of heavy metal, BMX biking, and Mountain Dew into a massive wall of sound, bassist Mike Kunka and drummer Dan Haugh managed to be punishingly loud and incredibly dorky. Their high point was their 1995 Sub Pop debut, Skyward in Triumph, on which Kunka’s wall of bass stacks was pitted against the out-of-control wallop of Haugh’s kit — most memorably on the album’s centerpiece, the 15-minute drone classic “Guardians of the Threshold.”

The National: Rock The Vote (Boston Phoenix, 5/26/10)

In the run-up to the 2008 election, the National weren’t shy about their political leanings: not only did they play Obama rallies, but the campaign used their “Fake Empire” numerous times in TV spots and live events. When I ask Bryan Devendorf about his band’s part in the campaign, he demurs: “I would underplay our role, really. We were just avid supporters of the Democrats — or, really, more like opponents of the Republicans.”

That’s the rock-and-roll spirit! Although it’s not unusual for rockers to get political, it is rare for them to get political in favor of something. (Rock and roll is the original party of no, after all.) Here are a couple of positive political endorsements in rock history, and one from a pre-rock icon:

NEIL YOUNG | Young threw his mostly-left-leaning fan base for a loop when he endorsed Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency. Of course, the early ’80s saw Young bucking trends in many other ways — like making totally uncommercial records. His Reagan fever had to do with what he perceived as a weakened American consciousness — but maybe it was drug-addled weakness that had him falling for “Morning in America.”

ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND | My guess is that Lynyrd Skynyrd weren’t the only band who didn’t need Neil Young around, as the song goes. Carter’s walloping at the hands of Reagan in 1980 must have stung the Allmans, who four years earlier had pulled out all the stops to endorse their favorite home-town-peanut-farmer-turned-political-wunderkind. Of course, it’s possible that Greg and company were motivated less by the prospect of a solar-powered White House than by the thought of a fellow Georgian in the big seat.

FRANK SINATRA | Back before all that rock and roll, music stars had no problem backing political candidates — or switching sides. The master of this was Ol’ Blue Eyes, who joined Neil Young in his support for the Gipper. But don’t mistake Sinatra for a lifelong conservative: starting with his 1944 support for FDR and continuing through the ’50s and into the ’60s, he was a dedicated supporter of leftish Dem causes. His switch was likely personal, stemming from a snub by none other than JFK himself in the early ’60s, after which Sinatra went red (state, that is) and never came back.

Beach House: Boys Meet Girls (Boston Phoenix, 3/23/10)

Dead Can Dance

Much of the press tumult over Beach House has focused on how the duo’s idiosyncratic musical style folds into a surging wave of like-minded indie artists eschewing rock histrionics for a gentler path to the hearts of music listeners — especially as it relates to their long-time association with gravelly indie-rock soothsters Grizzly Bear. But often overlooked is the band’s relationship to a specifically ’80s underground trend: the boy-girl duo. In the ’70s, such duos dominated the smooth seas of soft rock, whether it was the Captain & Tennille, Ashford & Simpson, Peaches & Herb, or the Carpenters. In the ’00s, we saw boy-girl rock duos like the White Stripes and the Raveonettes. Yet Beach House is more ’80s, where oddball duos made music that reflected their own inscrutable relationships, mapping the crags and crevices of their interpersonal dynamic onto the grooves of trend-bucking LPs that in many ways defined the weirdness of their time. Herewith, the four most crucial ’80s post-punk boy-girl duos.

YAZOO | Known to us Yanks as Yaz for legal reasons, the ’Zoo were the stop-gap project for synth-pop pioneer Vince Clarke, his weigh station between Depeche Mode and Erasure. And yet it can be argued that his partnership with Alison Moyet was the most forward-thinking and influential thing he ever did. Upstairs at Eric’s, Yazoo’s classic debut, arrived the same year as the Mode’s Speak and Spell (on which Clarke also worked) but far outpaces it in both dance-floor whump and after-party comedown intimacy. At once paranoid and bittersweet, the music of Yazoo continues to sound more presciently satisfying with each passing year.

DEAD CAN DANCE | An early 4AD signing, DCD took the better part of a decade to morph from the baroque mope pop of Australian transplants slumming it in blighty into world-music magpies. Lead vocalist Lisa Gerrard is perhaps the most sampled vocalist in history, her deep contralto sounding less like vibrations within a human throat than like an unmediated force of nature. Her working relationship with co-founder Brendan Perry has always been rocky, even in DCD’s best of times, but the band’s musical restlessness and self-seriousness drove them to create some of the most gorgeously uncategorizable music ever made.

EURYTHMICS | If it weren’t for MTV, we would probably never have noticed the fascinating chemistry of Scottish frontwoman Annie Lennox and her English producer/collaborator, Dave Stewart. But Lennox’s post-punk confrontational sense of style was given a medium whereby she could use her shock-orange-hair androgyny to ply the band’s mournful weirdness on the proverbial innocent rube in Peoria. Seventy-five million records later, the band’s legacy is secure, with Lennox as a vocal and style icon, and Stewart as an influential producer and musician.

TIMBUK3 | The quirky fluke hit of 1986’s “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades” briefly brought the husband-wife team of Pat and Barbara MacDonald into the limelight. Like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” it became popular in part because its US pop-music audience was unfamiliar with irony. But the millions who bought the band’s debut, Greetings from Timbuk3, expecting more of the same were greeted with pointed political cynicism and socio-political commentary set to a cheap beatbox and a grim country-folk bedrock.

Julian Casablancas: Prep rally (Boston Phoenix, 1/05/10)

Much of the early backlash that followed the Strokes’ meteoric rise had to do with the idea that a ’00s punk revival couldn’t be spearheaded by a band of moneyed prep-school twerps — as if boarding school and rock stars didn’t go together like marmalade and scones. Whether we’re talking about Julian Casablancas meeting several future Strokes at Switzerland’s Institut Le Rosey or a young John Mellor (later Joe Strummer) plotting his assault on the bourgeoisie at the prestigious Freemen’s School in Surrey, a number of rock’s most potent powder kegs have started off in crested blazers. Here are just a few of the preppiest insurrectionists:

FREDDIE MERCURY OF QUEEN | The young Farrokh Bulsara blossomed as a musical prodigy when he left the family nest in Zanzibar to study at St. Peter’s boarding school in Mumbai. It was here that he started his first band (the Hectics) and began calling himself Freddie, planting the seeds for the persona that would front one of the most successful (and flamboyantly awesome) acts of all time.

BRUCE DICKINSON OF IRON MAIDEN | At heart, boarding schools are about escape — which in young Master Bruce’s case meant goodbye to Nottinghamshire and hello to Northamptonshire’s Oundle, as well as to the school war-games society that he co-founded. A fitting pursuit for the future belter of “Die with Your Boots On” and “The Trooper.”

TIM AND NEIL FINN OF SPLIT ENZ/CROWDED HOUSE | Boarding school can be as brutal as it is posh — in his native New Zealand, at Auckland’s Sacred Heart College, Tim Finn set a school record by receiving 35 canings in one year. He passed on his defiant spirit to his younger brother, Neil, and the two would go on to form two of NZ’s most exciting bands. Both have spent decades using their musical careers to benefit various social causes — no doubt in large part because Tim understands what it means to be at the other end of the lash.

The Jesus Lizard: Texas Post-punk (Boston Phoenix, 11/11/09)

Asked how he developed his reckless on-stage persona, Yow credits the lawless and fertile Petri dish that was Texas post-punk. He recalls the “aura of danger” and the shows where there was “a really good chance that you would leave the venue injured.” So in honor of the welts and bruises meted upon a young Mr. Yow in pursuit of rock nirvana, here are three of the Lone Star State’s most fascinating firestarters.

REALLY RED | These early hardcore warriors mixed pure buzzsaw thunder with King Crimson laser-beam dorkitudes powered by the wounded howls of frontman Ron Bond (a/k/a U-Ron Bondage). Check their sole long-player, 1981’s beyond-essential Teaching You the Fear.

NCM (NON COMPOS MENTIS) | Although their discography comprises all of two seven-inch singles and a posthumous compilation track, Dallas’s NCM are one of Texas punk’s most notorious deathdealers. The 1980 “Ultimate Orgasm”/“Twist the Blade” single is a sick amalgam of bubblegum catchiness, breakneck punk, and sheer noise.

PAIN TEENS | Compared to the sarcastic yuks of so much noisy ’90s shock rock (hello, Butthole Surfers!), husband/wife team Scott Ayers and Bliss Blood were refreshingly sincere. Houston’s Pain Teens offered grim explorations of mankind’s psychic horrors set to increasingly experimental rock. Their 1990 masterwork,Born in Blood, mixes the kink of goth with a metallic howl more akin to no-wavers like Lydia Lunch.

Dinosaur Jr: Three ill-fated trios (Boston Phoenix, 9/29/09)

I have a theory that musical trios are as cursed as any non-musical threesome. Alliances of two against one and ego imbalances are inevitable. Dinosaur Jr. were able to reconcile, but here are three archetypical power trios who just couldn’t keep it together.

CREAM [1966-1968] | Cream were three immense egoists who found a way out of dealing with one another by turning up the volume and loosening up the pop song. The result was, as they say, sheer heaviosity: the amps multiplied, the decibels climbed, and the song lengths crept into the 20-minute range while the audience watched each band member ignore the other two entirely. Their output may sound quaint today, but noise-mongering trios everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to the massive egos of Jack, Ginger, and Eric.

THE POLICE [1977-1984] | Sting, Stewart, and Andy upped Cream’s ante in terms of being three self-centered assholes turning internal issues into #1 hits. Amid the punk class of ’77, they stuck out as overachieving jazzbos secretly longing to write chart toppers while smuggling reggae undercurrents into the overground. But beneath the veneer of success was a deep unease, as Copeland’s unwillingness to be controlled clashed with Sting’s not-so-secret wish to go solo – which, as we know all too well, he did.

MCLUSKY [1996-2005] | What rock trio have deconstructed the rock-band mythology as deftly as Cardiff’s Mclusky? The bitterness and resentment that seep out of sneerfests like “Collagen Rock” and “To Hell with Good Intentions” made 2002′s Mclusky Do Dallas (Too Pure) a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the modern rock unit. A disagreement after having their shit stolen during a 2004 US tour led to the perma-defriending of singer/guitarist Andy “Falco” Falkous and bassist Jonathan Chapple, leaving sad fans with nothing to do but read between the lines of “Fuck This Band.”