The Phantom Limbs The Phantom Limbs Displacement (Alternative ...
There's Glenn Danzig and Ann Rice scary, where you take yourself so seriously in trying to be scary that you come off more like a sad dope that is a little bit too obsessed with Halloween. We've all seen the goth kid stroll into McDonald's wearing all black ("I'll have a Whopper with extra ketchup, blah, blah, blah!"). Then there's Peter Jackson and Rob Zombie scary, where everything is rightly a bit tongue-in-cheek.
The moment you consider yourself a true teller of evil and horrific tales, you've crossed the line into goth geekdom where you can't accept the fact that most vampires wouldn't walk the streets at night sporting $100 sunglasses and the latest in leather club gear.
A good example of walking of that fine line between disturbing and knowing scariness is the new Phantom Limbs album Displacement. Much like the great comic Criminal Macabre by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith where vampires are more like homeless degenerates, the Phantom Limbs offer a different and quite frankly more entertaining form of scary. It's a disturbing carnie sideshow gone wrong.
Remember that organ that was always playing in the background of 1950s and 60s horror movies? That sound permeates the Phantom Limbs' music, with keyboardist Stevenson Sedgwick overpowering the mix like Ray Manzerek's dark child. "Active Verbs" and "Castanets Cookie" both feature a Carnival of Souls theme-song-on-smack sound. Also endearing are Hopeless' distraught vocals. More like Renfield returning as a Bay-area punk, Ball adds to the desperate and demented feel of "Wrenches and Spoons" and "From a Distance." Rumors of him storming on stage either naked or covered in grease paint certainly add to this feeling of a lunatic set loose.
Lyrically, Ball is at least 700 times more interesting than the average death metal freak. Rather than focusing on gothic evil or Satan returning to have sex with Swedish women, Ball's fascination is with more pedestrian forms of death and the dark side, as evidenced by lyrics such as "I hate the drowning man who digs into my skin/wants me to take a swim with him."
The music is frenetic, off-kilter, and just? not right. Drummer Mike Klösoff, guitarist Jason Miller and bassist Sköt B rarely if ever play in straight time. Their rhythmic feel is more akin to a caterwauling, drunken belly dancer. The formula to their sound is simple?create an overall sense of uneasiness and discomfort?but it works. It's damn eerie to listen to, but at the same time it's as unique a style as you'll find these days. Much like acts such as the Flaming Stars they have that innate ability to conjure up 50s pulp with a somewhat retro sound that is nowhere near pure mimicry. A million images flash into your head while listening to it?Bela Lugosi in his final days on smack, movies like Spider Baby or Homicidal, panels from EC comics.
Most importantly, it's done with a sarcastic smile. Remember all the William Castle films you saw as a kid and you'll get the idea.
?Ken Wohlrob
Too many rockers become parents, panic at growing old and attempt to reinvent themselves as hipster alternatives to Barney and Raffi. The best ones, at least, are willing to become clowns in the process. For example, A Day at the Farm with Farmer Jason is exactly the kind of big dopey fun you'd expect from a gutter-level rock star like Jason Ringenberg.
Formerly of Jason and The Scorchers, Ringenberg totally embraces his high concept with jokey pop tunes that tour his many acres. "A Guitar Pickin' Chicken" and "I'm Just an Old Cow" are perfectly fun moments that have probably already been sketched up on an animator's drawing board. Grown-ups will feel bad for ever thinking Jason was cool, though, once they see the liner notes where he thanks "Suzy for helping to show Farmer Jason how to grow love."
By contrast, Dan Zanes' House Party is evil kiddie indoctrination. Packaged like a Golden Book, the innocent casing houses the former Del Fuego's plot to recycle dopey folk and world music into a bright plastic setting. Thanks, Dan, but we'll decide for ourselves when our kids learn "Kumbayah"?or any fashionable variations thereof.
?J.R. Taylor
The 28 tracks include three stunning pop moments from early David Crosby, which are almost painful in light of how he became David Crosby. Plenty of fine moments from Gene Clark are also still around to be salvaged. Peter Fonda's lost "November Nights" (written by Gram Parsons) is a particularly great find, echoing the innovation of Love but indebted to co-producer Hugh Masekela.
Nearly every track is honestly rare, and any that seem like a waste of time will thrill some other Byrds fan. The universal winner, though, is "Shoot 'Em," a Roger McGuinn B-movie theme which sounds taped right off a moldy VHS tape. It's an inspired piece of AM pop, contrasted by the aging hippie singing about "cosmic explosions going off inside your head" and how "you don't know it, but your next breath may be your last?sucker."
?J.R. Taylor
This where my heart warms to his strategy, the bootleg king ("Being Scrubbed," "I Wanna Dance with Numbers") genuinely in love with the abandoned and rejected, delighting in reconfiguring the tainted as glamorous, toying with the conceptual boundary twixt garish and Vogue cover. Even the most glamorous delights, Kelis singing the SOS Band's "Finest" rubbed up bootleg-style against Phil Oakley's "Electric Dreams," have echoes of the gutter. "Finest," notorious in the UK as the shiver in the spine of Foul Play's "Finest Illusion," interestingly is also a copyright battlefield. This angle suits him well everywhere but on the two Evan-Stickland tracks which "succeed" in recontextualising Deborah as mildewed debutante. Their "Walk On By," I skipped.
The "X" sound is wrenching rubber and chrome-piston perfection. For neophytes (who dem?), sonic signposts include early Ultravox, the Human League, Imagination and Mtume's "Juicy Fruit." Certainly worth investigating.
?Mathew Ingram
On 3, as on the band's previous releases, the Velvet Underground and Nico hover like great totemic spirits. Slumber Party is sunnier and cheerier, more poppy and loose than its musical ancestors. In fact, they're almost too loose. This album has a rough, throw-away feel to it, with Aliccia Berg's compelling, affect-less vocals buried in the mix. Tracks peter out with little excursions after what sounded like the songs are already over. Slumber Party might benefit by dropping the cool pose and putting in a little more time on the firing range.
Still, 3 has a lot of charm, especially on guitarist Gretchen Gonzales' songs. "New Trouble" mixes a catchy, rhythmic organ vamp and darker, bluesier guitar. "Black Heart Road" has a country feel and tighter structure than other tracks. "Why?" features lovely floating and spacious piano and guitar with half-whispered, half-spoken vocals. Berg's "Electric Boots" effectively melds ethereal, girlish vocals with a darker instrumental that seems to come from another place altogether, and "Behave" is a little more of a rocker. The overall effect is like that of a blurry snapshot with lots going on in the corners of the frame.
?Eva Neuberg