Enduring 'Genius'

While my earliest memory of Tom Tom Club is simply as the band that interrupted Stop Making Sense, the work that vocalist/ drummer Chris Frantz and bassist/singer Tina Weymouth (both formerly of Talking Heads and the aforementioned warmlyremembered concert film) have made in the last few decades cannot be so easily dismissed. A new wave of Tom Tom Club activity has been spurred by their relatively recent alliance with Tomas Cookman and his Nacional Records, a house built on the experimental Latin works of artists like Los Fabulosos Cadilacs, Manu Chao, Aterciopelados and many others.

After being tapped to produce Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Tom Tom Club developed a relationship with Cookman that’s blossomed into one of great fealty and friendship. Last month, the group released the rather unusually-formatted Genius of Live album, a double-CD set containing one recording made of the crack live band at Frantz and Weymouth’s Connecticut home studio before an audience of friends in 2001, and one disc composed entirely of remixes of “Genius of Love” by the outsider Latin artists that form the bulk of Nacional’s roster. While the idea of putting out a collection of such conceptually unwieldy music with no real new material on two CDs in the present indie record landscape may seem a bit confounding, it is also something of a testament to the truly individual energy of Tom Tom Club and its utter disregard for concerns beyond a pure and id-heavy mission statement.

As Frantz bluntly states, “It’s always better to have a new record out if you’re doing a tour. The two go hand in hand. The tour helps to promote the CD and the CD helps to promote the live shows. Of course, these days all those tried and true business considerations are perhaps less true than they used to be.” Pangs of industry doom aside, as a basic reinstatement and advertisement of their essential strengths and powers as a band, Genius of Live is largely a success.

With a large international band anchored by Frantz and Weymouth—and also including Steve Scales, sometimes percussionist for Talking Heads and the tireless hypeman of Stop Making Sense— Genius of Live expresses Tom Tom Club as it most likes to be expressed: a live band creating a dense and joyous energy largely shed of the skin of high art pretense. As Frantz says, “We try to transport the audience to a sweet spot in the universe. We aren’t really interested in telling people about our problems or our troubles. We make music that brings art rock to the dance floor. Making it funky is an art in itself.” And, in reference to the difference between the live missions of his present and former bands, “Tom Tom Club may have a different sound than Talking Heads, but the engine that drives it is exactly the same.”

While Genius of Live may begin somewhat anti-climactically with the band’s biggest hit, “Genius of Love,” in a slightly slowed-down and family-friendly rendition—the classic refrain replaces “fun, nasty, fun” with “fun, natural, fun,” though at least “I went insane when I took cocaine” remains—once the Club settles in fully, the set proves a display of the group’s unique force. Tom Tom Club’s music is, for the most part, one of extreme focus, both in terms of the rhythmic detail of all the musicians present and in the musical vocabulary itself. Like the world-beating funk units the band aspires to be like, the music here often repeats itself—melodic fragments and rhythmic hits recur in slightly altered fashion throughout. But, rather than making the music feel limited, this works to Tom Tom Club’s stated mission of dance-floor hypnosis and potential ecstatic abandon. And, while “Genius of Love” will always be the group’s defining turn, the long rendition of other early single “Wordy Rappinghood” actually provides the set’s most thrilling and surprising moments; with its typewriter-solo intro and ultra-strange faux-American Indian chorus, it sounds the most aggressively alive of everything on the record, if by virtue of nothing more than its unerring eccentricity.

This sense of unspooled avantgarde adventure tethered to the more fundamental groove theorems of Tom Tom Club proves its most winning legacy. As Frantz says of the early hip-hop that birthed Tom Tom Club: “We love the pre-corporate days of Afrika Bambaata and Kraftwerk when it was impossible to predict what might happen next... There was a time when black musicians and white musicians were actually looking to each other for inspiration. Things have become more and more niche and compartmentalized. But we are very happy to have the mysteries of the Latin alternative world being revealed to us now. There is an undeniable energy and colorful influence coming from there. Mucho gusto!”

>> Tom Tom Club Oct. 14, Santos Party House, 100 Lafayette St. (betw. Walker & White Sts.), 212-584-5492; 7, $25. Also Oct. 16 at Brooklyn Bowl.