Chavez @ Spaceland, 12/31/06

New York art rockers Chavez aren’t exactly yr archetypal party band, but I was still trying to live it up a bit at their New Year’s Eve L.A. show. As a result, I didn’t approach the show with the kind of, erm, rigor that would produce a proper show review. Playing Johnny Snapshot or Sammy Setlistgrabber stresses me out to much to make it a party. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

In this very space I’ve previously praised Chavez’ mix of the rock, the pop and the weird. Somehow along the way they built up an air of mystery for me–how did they do this?–that’s dispelled a little when four dudes in jeans and button-down shirts, variously shaggy and bleary-eyed, strap on instruments and take the stage. I say a little because I coulda spent the night just watching guitarist Clay Tarver and trying to figure out how those moves made those sounds come out of the amp.

So Tarver and bassist Scott Marshall seemed to be having a blast, while “the” James Lo, stoic, battered out heavy beats with eerily little sign of effort and singer/guitarist Matt Sweeney applied a vaguely grumpy intensity to his frontman duties.

Out of this, a 90s four-piece reformed for a month or so of transAmerican rocking, arose a sort of majesty. The men of Chavez have expertly honed the soft-loud dynamic into a complicated push and pull of tension and release. Indie rock of the 90s had a well-earned reputation for being kinda sexless–hell, there’s no roll in Chavez’ rock–but the play of anticipation and catharsis that’s a Chavez signature, worlds beyond the same-old “hit the stombox on the chorus,” made me think of sex. The really good kind.

Soft parts give way as monster drums kick in and stop abruptly. A second guitar blares away a dissonant lead punctuated with unbluesy bent notes. Now the drums are in for real, and it’s resolved to massive freedom rock chords. The bass waits a couple bars and before storming in to add heft and, yes, maybe, a groove.

And so on, every song a little puzzle, a sweaty wrestling match, an alternate-reality anthem. I guess, succinctly, Chavez fucking rocked. Not a bad way to start the new year.

(Because we like providing evidence of some type, below a couple of hilarious Chavez videos from ten years back or so.)

“Unreal Is Here”

Better Days Will Haunt You at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

The Secret Stars “Your Life To Live”

In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here’s some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists.

“Your Life To Live,” off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals over smudged acoustic strums and subtle bass accompaniment from Jodi Buonanno.

Even for all the wonder, there’s an edge of anxiety, a sense of capturing a feeling that could fade or a good thing that could slip from yr grasp. The chorus projects the object of affection later possibly on the movie screen rather than in the next seat in the theater, mediated in the future where she’s immediate now. I’m also not sure what to make of a song title that’s more at home as part of a kiss-off rather than a lovestruck paean.

But of course everywhere else, the song overflows with her presence.

This might fall somewhere into the region that’s oft-derided as “twee”–and OK, this tune is totally cute. I was gonna argue that there’s something ballsy in the heart-on-sleeve quality, the torn-valentine earnestness, the subcult hat-tips. But when I think it over the claim feels kinda anachronistic.

I’m fumbling around here, but the sunny yet autumnal feel, and all of the above signifiers, sort of mark this as a document of something we’ve lost in the Interweb age, just dawning at that time. I’m in love with the modern world, but, hey, y’all know I’m also prone to nostalgia.

I could never figure out the handshake–I was more of a spectator and solitary fan–but there was still a sense of inclusiveness for the excluded. Enlisting, through dedication to one or another aesthetic, in a community of outsiders. Shrimper cassettes as membership badge to a secret club. Believe it or not, there was a time when some folks could still say “alternative” without snickering or “indie” without pausing to pick apart that shorthand for all its emptiness and inconsistencies. (The death of that naivete isn’t all bad.)

(There’s a whole other critique we could dive into–way off-track–about buying into an identity, etc., but it’s totally unfair to throw the weight of an entire era, or really of an evergreen pop culture conundrum, on the unassuming heads of TSS and their small-scope song of crushed-out joy.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Secret Stars were letting you into their world with these songs about their lives and their friends. There’s some presumption that it would resonate, that yr concerns were in some ways like theirs, yr group of friends like theirs. On second thought that sounds like, I dunno, blogging or vlogging or YouTubing or…

So maybe let’s just talk about a young man, singing in amazement at the gift he’s been given, the perfect girl.

TSS at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Pernice Brothers “Grudge F*** (2006)”
Scud Mountain Boys “Grudge ****”

Stop the presses! Two days in a row with 2006 content! (Well, sorta.)

Massachusetts native Joe Pernice has a smooth and increasingly smoky voice that recalls the Zombies’ Colin Blunstone at time, a bad attitude and a gift for insidiuosly catchy melodies.

In the mid-90s he applied these tools to a usually mellow country-rock, in retrospect really eschewing the “alt,” as frontman of the Scud Mountain Boys. His songs fleshed out a sublimely fatalistic vision of low-rent, working-class living that was in some ways uniquely Western Mass. On that group’s great final record, 1996’s Massachusetts, Pernice uncorked what felt like his pinnacle song, “Grudge Fuck.” (I mean, let’s speak plainly here.)

The Scuds took a pristine AM gold melody that could’ve been the result of some sort of Jim Croce-Bread collaboration, and ran it through a dive-bar last-call atmosphere worthy of early Waits. And indeed, it’s a late night tale: the song’s speaker lays down a pretty heavy rap of self-loathing: he’s sloshed, he’s stoned, he’s pleading for his old girlfriend to let him come over.

Some of us may have been to a place like this at one time or another. C’mon, baby. Remember the good times? Whatever happened to us? We’re friends. Friends can cuddle, right? Do you think, just one last time… (I’ll equivocate slightly and at least admit to this song’s setting off the fake nostalgia bells that I so often seek to ring.)

It’s such a pathetic ploy for ex sex–we know he’s lying when he says, “I swear to G-d I’d never touch you,” because after all, “I’d give anything to make it with you/just one more time”–that it crosses over, in and of itself, to bleakest dark comedy.

Ah, but the plot thickens. You see, the song’s not called “Mercy Fuck,” which is what he’s asking for. The implications of the title are postively sinister–namely, it’s all a ruse, this isn’t about lonely desperation but something closer to calculated revenge.

I told you Joe Pernice has a bad attitude.

On last months’s new release Live a Little, the Pernice Brothers, Joe’s going concern in more of a classic pop style, close out with a ten-year anniversary revisit of “Grudge Fuck.” This is clearly designed to: (a) revive the tune, (b) acknowledge it as maybe Joe’s best song, indeed one of the few Scud tunes to carry over to the Bros’ live set, (c) make me say, “Holy shit, I’m getting old,” or (d) all of the above.

The revision is slight. You can just barely hear the cigarettes consumed between 1996 and 2006 sexing up Joe’s vocal chords. The piano’s tinnier, the bass incrementally showier. There’s strings now, but not too sappy, and backing vocals, perhaps a little too sappy.

What’s interesting is that Joe’s muse has moved slightly upscale over the last decade. His chosen subject has moved on from van drunks and scratch ticket addicts to clock-watching temps and dayjob wage slaves in monkey suits. He’s a little more Moz/Elvis C. and a little less, well, mopey version of Croce/Bread. “Grudge Fuck” still carries with it that whiff of the downscale days, so it’s a tad–just a tad, really–out of step with his newer work as a result.

But here’s the thing: my initial reaction to a new Pernice record, at least after the Bros.’ ridiculously poppy and upbeat (sounding) second effort, The World Won’t End, is usually muted. His grasp of pop songwriting craft is so complete that I need to let the discs grow on me. It’s almost too much beauty. I need to give the songs time, need to mine the veins where I’ll find personal resonance.

So, in terms of instant gratification, it’s nice to pick up a Pernice disc and know right away that I love one of the songs on it.

Live a Little at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
Massachusetts at Target. (and at iTunes.)

Lemonheads “Skulls”

So here’s the fun Halloween-themed post that I aimed for and thoroughly botched this morning. Evan Dando, king of the alt-rock covers, gives the solo acoustic treatment to a Misfits classic, off 1991 EP Favorite Spanish Dishes.

Take your pick from the irony bin: the natural tension of gruesome lyrics about a serial killer sung prettily; or “hack the heads off little girls/and put ‘em on my wall” after this morning’s debacle.

The Lemonheads were never my pick of the hometown homestate scene, but Dando acquits himself well here. Then again, “Skulls” is a killer pop tune, so it’d be tough to fuck it up.

Now, the NKOTB cover off the same EP–there’s some horror for you.

[Favorite Spanish Dishes is out of print.]

Sebadoh “Vampire”
Helium “Baby Vampire Made Me” “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby”

Today, three songs about the undead, all alt-rock from the Commonwealth. But it’s turned into fair warning (to me) that when you pick songs by title you can blunder into deeper, more harrowing waters than you intended.

The vampire in Sebadoh’s “Vampire,” off 1992’s Rocking The Forest, is needy and grasping, playing passive-aggressive games, sucking the life out of the relationship and the air out of the room. Somehow they managed to even produce a passive-aggressive arrangement. Stinging guitar work through amps distorted to the verge of failure, often tuned down in the mix, are set against mellow vocals and thrumming indie guitar swing.

Mary Timony and co. shoehorned the off-kilter rhythms of the Fall and My Bloody Valentine’s gauzy guitarscapes into a uniquely fractured, doomy style on their early work. Helium’s A/B burners “Baby Vampire Made Me” and “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” from 1994 EP Pirate Prude exploits this heavy trip to go real dark–diving into the real-life horror of an unwanted pregnancy and abortion.

In “Baby Vampire Made Me,” the vampire is in the womb, not a gift but a parasite, and it threatens to turn the woman into a vampire as well, latched on to a would-be father the verses address. Around 4:40 the song coalesces into an almost-bluesy riff and the words turns elegaicly to the child never born.

“Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” gets a lighter, prettier musical treatment, but cutting through the mystery of what it’s telling is tough–it seems that in the aftermath, the previous song’s speaker feels at once haunted and watched-over, thinking of an afterlife where she joins that never-born baby.

This post was hard for me to write–something intended as just-this-side-of-jocular turned heartbreaking and confusing. Which actually gets at something I love about Helium’s work before they turned prog. There was this bizarre mix of fanciful, little-girl imagery and just the most pitch-black ruminations on women abused, feeling like whores, feeling dirty inside. It would be a women’s-study thesis if it weren’t so vividly, deeply felt, so forceful.

I use the word mystery above. As much as I feel that essentialism is a trap, I’m also reminded at times like this that there’s a well of sadness that, as a man, I can’t possibly know in this life.

Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock (U.S. CD with “Vampire”) at Newbury Comics.
Pirate Prude is out of print, but at the moment is gettable cheap via Amazon.