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.”

Listomania! Top 10 Songs of 2009 (Boston Phoenix, 12/21/09)

Other Phoenix writer picks can be found HERE!

1. The Horrors, “Scarlet Fields” (from Primary Colours)
2. Lady Gaga, “Dance In The Dark” (from The Fame Monster)
3. Julian Casablancas, “Glass” (from Phrazes of the Young)
4. Crippled Black Phoenix, “Rise Up and Fight” (from 200 Tons of Bad Luck)
5. Fuck Buttons, “The Lisbon Maru” (from Tarot Sport)
6. Municipal Waste, “Wolves Of Chernobyl” (from Massive Aggressive)
7. Pissed Jeans, “False Jesii Part 2″ (from King Of Jeans)
8. Lightning Bolt, “Sound Guardians” (from Earthly Delights)
9. Shakira, “Loba” (from She Wolf)
10. Spinnerette, “All Babes Are Wolves” (from Spinnerette)

2009 was a year that saw so many musical areas blossoming like never before, after years of retrenchment. This year, the metal was metal-y-er, the pop was poppier, the noise-duos were noise-duo-y-er, and the shoegaze/mope-goth was more shoegaze/mope-goth-y. “See yourself/your image in the eyes of someone else” goes the pre-chorus of The Horrors’ “Scarlet Fields”. I’m guessing that the band took their own advice, as their new long-player Primary Colours found them remaking themselves from 3rd-tier splatter-garage into an actual second coming of MBV. As we all spent 2009 attempting to sort out the real from the imaginary and idealized in our culture’s looking glass, our music continued to replicate the sound of the shards of the mirror hitting the floor. - Daniel Brockman

Marnie Stern: About That Style… (Boston Phoenix, 11/24/08)

Great moments in two-handed finger tapping

CLASSIC(AL): On Ozzy’s “Flying High Again,” Randy Rhoads had mohawked Beethovens and Mozarts headbanging in heaven.

Marnie Stern’s guitar style is notable for the two ways she breaks from the indie-rock-guitar rulebook. She wears her guitar strapped really high up, something that’s frowned on because it looks dorky. And she does a significant amount of two-hand tapping, a practice often shunned as gimmicky by people who hate things that rule.

 

In fact, two-hand tapping predates the rock-and-roll era. As early as 1952, Jimmy Webster was flogging his allegedly revolutionary “Touch System,” an approach to the instrument that was about as popular with guitarists as Esperanto was with linguists. In the early ’70s, Emmett Chapman began to perfect a tap-friendly guitar/bass hybrid that became the Chapman Stick (an instrument that no one who isn’t named Tony Levin should be allowed to play under any circumstances). But it took the shred-friendly ’80s to allow glimpses of tapping to penetrate pop radio (Exhibit A: Neil Schon’s flourishes in “Don’t Stop Believing”). Here are a handful of highlights from the history of two-hand tapping.

EDDIE VAN HALEN OF VAN HALEN | “ERUPTION” | VAN HALEN [1978] | Ground Zero for tapping. Eddie combines classical rigor and bombastic rock tactics to blow up headsScanners-style with musical awesomeness. Quick, name another track that gets classic-rock radio listeners to throw the devil horns at quotations from Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Etude No. 2.

TONY LEVIN OF KING CRIMSON | “ELEPHANT TALK” | DISCIPLINE [1981] | True, this may be the clarion call that launched a thousand Primuses, but Levin’s skronky fluidity is a sound to behold regardless of your tolerance for prog signifiers.

RANDY RHOADS OF OZZY OSBOURNE | “FLYING HIGH AGAIN” | BARK AT THE MOON[1981] | Few guitarists made classical flourishes sound as rad as RR, and this is arguably his finest moment: from 2:18 to 2:47, he takes a pretty standard rocker and turns it on its head, with mohawked Beethovens and Mozarts headbanging in heaven.

ANGUS YOUNG OF AC/DC | “THUNDERSTRUCK” | THE RAZOR‘S EDGE [1989] | It takes real innovation to come up with a two-hand tapping riff so amazingly bad-ass that you can open up a stadium show with it. “Thunderstruck” synthesizes everything that rules about metal and rock and runs it through a classical meatgrinder, spraying the blood of awesome everywhere in the process.

BRIAN GIBSON OF LIGHTNING BOLT | “CROWN OF STORMS” | WONDERFUL RAINBOW[2003] | The guitar heroes of the ’90s tended to eschew hair-metal techniques like tapping (and practicing, and tuning . . . ), and that makes the return of tap in the hands of this two-person noise ensemble all the more unlikely. Simultaneously childlike, joyous, and furious, Gibson’s tap attack here fits right in with the sensory-overload rock that’s Lightning Bolt’s specialty.