No Dead Time
The Panoply Academy Legionnaires (Secretly Canadian)

I mention this because it’s now 2001 and the modern music, the new sound, the disturbed and disturbing noises, the damaged art punk is being recorded on horse farms in southern Indiana and shoeboxes in Chicago, no room for silence or introspection, got to keep moving, got to keep grooving, make some sense of this multitextured revisionist life of ours. Man and machine are indistinguishable, no less so and certainly no more so than 25 years before. I love this sound, it’s the sound I was reared and bred on, it’s the sound that sends my legs into the occasional unlooked-for spasm, but it seems that as much as these four Bloomington, IN, boys clearly think they’re creating something unique to them and them alone, to me it merely resonates with the alienated, obscure ghosts of my past. Or is it future?

I’m sure that in 25 years I’ll be hearing another generation kick those drums and silence those squealing voices at indeterminate intervals, maybe throw in the odd disconcerting flurry of trumpet, and then speed merrily on like they’re the only people to ever have encompassed this sound. Why, the singer even bleats like a goat (just like Mr. Thomas). Maybe in 1950 Louis Armstrong was knocking out oddities like these, in his slightly diseased art punk phase we hear so little about. But I doubt it. Why is it that everything Secretly Canadian releases features men with high-pitched voices? Now, don’t get me wrong. I miss Pylon’s edginess and the artificial intelligence of This Heat. Badly. I’m just not sure many others do.