...but I've added my bit too. Sort-of-review of the Swing Kids discography, a digression on the merits of emo sub-genres, and an explanation of why '43 Seconds' is such an awesome song, have all been added to the post below...
I had intended doing all that yesterday, but it was sunny outside (also, kind of, today) and I'm just an emo kid, not a goth. Not that there would be anything wrong with that, of course.
The above image is a graphical representation of the current text of this blog. I found out about this today from Organizing Grievances which carried a similar treatment of Obama and McCain's blogs (hint: they both talk about Obama a lot). As you see here, I've talked a lot about the Swing Kids.
You can make your own over at wordle.net. Just paste in text, a url or a feed and the applet creates a 'word cloud' within seconds. I've left the screengrab at the full size, so you can expand it and see all the words.
"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."
See Reasons to be Emo #50 and #100. This is the 140th post on Hardcore for Nerds, and also marks one year to the day of blogging on here (I started a few days previous on Steady Diet of Books, but it’s been on hiatus for a while) When I started, I had a small list of records I wanted to post, starting of course with the Han Shan 7". But Swing Kids wasn’t on that list, because it has to be the starting point, the origin, to this sort of music. It’s been covered multiple times in other blogs (see below) and the discography was the very first thing of original emo music that I heard.
Specifically, hardcore emo music. This is where I get up and wave my little Fourfa flag. Researching – to use the term fairly loosely – this and a few other posts recently, I saw some message boards with the fairly predictable kind of comments “yeah, Fourfa is okay but it’s wrong on a lot of [unmentioned] things” or “Fourfa, sure, but real emo is…”. They’re not actual quotes, and it is sort of a straw man argument – on both sides – but I’m inclined to give a lot more tolerance to what is one man’s concisely, humorously and sympathetically expressed view of the emo movement.
The Fourfa site was set up some years ago by a guy named Andy Radin, who played bass for a while with Funeral Diner, and its age in fact explains why it says little about what has been the modern emo (screamo) movement throughout most of the 00s, after bands such like Saetia or Orchid split up and were replaced by (obviously) Hot Cross, Ampere, Funeral Diner, Sinaloa, La Quiete, Raein, Daitro and the monumental creative arc of Japan’s Envy. But before that, between say 1985-2000, Fourfa does a pretty good overview and in some cases detailed analysis of the original genre and (gasp!) sub-genres. One of the latter is ‘hardcore emo’, which is quite obviously different from Rites of Spring, Embrace-type early emo (‘emocore’) and reasonably distinct from the quiet-to-loud, linearly dynamic ‘emo’ sound of Moss Icon, Native Nod or Indian Summer (the last somewhat less so). More chaotic, faster, often jazzier, mainly (though not exclusively) from the San Diego area, and dating from the early- to mid-90s, is ‘hardcore emo’, best exemplified by Swing Kids or Heroin.
Of course, that’s just my own attempt to put across a reasonably nuanced, not too rigid account of the genres as propagated across the web by Radin; there aren’t strict demarcations between them, and they are equally retrospective designations for influential bands as they were contemporary attempts to categorise an emerging sound. At bottom, they are just concepts. Concepts can be reassigned; they can be reimagined; they can be subverted; they can distort. Concepts are maya: the sooner one realises that, the sooner one can realise what a dog’s Buddha nature is.
Anyway, this is what Fourfa says about the Swing Kids, under the ‘Best Emo Records of all time…’ section which kept me occupied for several years:
“Hard to sum up in a few sentences. The first track on the 7" is still probably the best single example from this style, heavy and gut-wrenching yet brilliantly musical. In my opinion this was Justin Pearson (Struggle, Locust, etc) at his very finest”
That first track, ‘El Camino Car Crash’, is embedded above and, at 1:36 long, is probably the simplest and best introduction to the band and this style. It’s mostly impossible to hear the lyrics, though trust me that that’s the first line, “this intimate biography of shit, consisting of severed limbs, missing organs…” (you can check them all here). The only really audible part is the middle, “But. When. It. Settles. You. Will. Learn (that bullshit talks, that bullshit walks)”. It’s heavy, visceral stuff, but pulled off with such flair and musical honesty that it’s impossible not to like, assuming I suppose that you have a pre-existing tolerance for punk rock. ‘El Camino Car Crash’ drags and spins, turns in on itself and explodes in a fury that is still foot-tappingly (or body-slamming) rhythmic.
From there on in, Swing Kids – Discography is a beyond exhilarating, frenetic ride through punk rock at both its rawest and its most creatively proficient. Between the vicious, chaotic attack of guitars is a deep underlying rhythm and melody, momentary interludes of jazzy percussion and spin-on-the-head-of-a-coin balance. And between that, is a dark and wounded lyrical world, where the musical expression of sorrow and fury collide into generational narcissism and nihilism; “we’ve all been fucked up… sooner or later, we all die” (‘Line #1’). At the same time, it’s progressive; grim, but not without glimpses of clarity - “maybe it’s because we’re so incomplete” (‘Blue Note’).
Midway through the discography is one of the most interesting, musically and artistically, tracks on the record: a cover version of Joy Division’s ‘Warsaw’. Essentially a sped-up, aggressive but emotionally poignant version of the post-punk classic, it’s chorus “3-1-G” gave the name to the Swing Kids’ San Diego-based label, Three One G, which along with Gravity Records hosted the majority of the San Diego-core hardcore emo and post-punk bands. ‘Warsaw’ also leads into the only section of actual jazz on the disc, in the one-minute long intro to ‘Disease’. The original Swing Kids name came from the Swingjuden or ‘Swing Youth’, a counter-cultural movement of Nazi Germany, where most jazz was repressed as degenerate music. As a social and cultural expression of political opposition,
"The members of the Swing youth oppose today's Germany and its police, the Party and its policy, the Hitlerjugend, work and military service, and are opposed, or at least indifferent, to the ongoing war. They see the mechanisms of National Socialism as a "mass obligation". The greatest adventure of all times leaves them indifferent; much to the contrary, they long for everything that is not German, but English."
"An important time of progression for hardcore music were the 1990s, when several bands created new sounds and hardcore music changed fast and finally split up (once again…) in diverse scenes, from tough-guy-metal-bullshit to a innovative, political scene all around the world, which transformed the music into new spheres and kept the original punk spirit alive. One of the epicentre of this movement was San Diego, with the Swing Kids as one of their important bands. But not only outstanding for San Diego, Swing Kids created a whole new sound and brought the progressions of the last years to the point, Screamo (built up from the words scream and emotion) was born. Chaotic song structures, screamed vocals, melodic guitars - no one did it in this intensity before.
Swing Kids only released a debut 7inch and a split 10inch with Spanakorzo, 8 tracks (one a Joy Division cover version!) that took the world by storm (plus one previously unreleased song on the discography) and made an impressive mark in the little time that they existed. They broke up 1997, but the impact they left and the sound they pioneered & inspired can be heard in many bands until today.
Eric Allen, who committed suicide in 1998, played also with hardcore band Unbroken, other members later went on to acts such as The Locust, Some Girls, Sweep the Leg Johnny, Bread and Circuits and Yaphet Koto. If you are into hardcore you know how good all this bands were/are."
"The sound of San Diego Hardcore in the nineties was all over the place. Chaos reigned supreme, spastic drummers and schizophrenic guitars, usually mixed with impassioned vocals leading the charge. Typically before you knew it, the moment was gone and you were left standing trying to figure out exactly what happened.
This was a golden time in Hardcore, Swing Kids were a golden band. Sitting at the edge of the American Dream, they were fed up, they had something to say and by god they were going to say it.
As previously mentioned, during this period bands would be lucky to last more than a few years before they had burned out their initial rage and fell to the wayside. Swing Kids were no exception, only recording a 7" and a split 10" with Spanakorzo and donating one song to compilation before their fire burned out, but it's these nine songs, much like with bands such as Heroin and Indian Summer, that would help ignite a sound that would permeate all that would come after.
Sadly, Swing Kids split up and shortly thereafter, their guitarist Eric committed suicide, putting the official nail in the coffin of the Swing Kids legacy. Singer Justin Pearson went on to form Struggle and the widely well more known The Locust who still continue on to this day."
"Swing Kidswere an early 90's hardcore band from San Diego, CA. Being a hardcore band from San Diego at that time meant everything played was fast, jazzy and on the verge of total chaos, but with just the perfect measure of restraint and control. Just take a listen to bands such as Heroin, Drive Like Jehu, The Locust and you recognize it in an instant. Swing Kids had all of these ingredients and put them together just right to create a blazing fury of dynamic jazzed out punk. Screaming lunatic mad right off the rails. They are fast and unrelenting and smart about their approach. Skittering hi-hats and shredding vocal delivery and its over before you know it. Nothing wasted and everything put to good use. Every last buzzsaw guitar and even a great cover of Joy Division's "Warsaw" make this record one for punk history. Members went on to play in The Locust, Bread and Circuits and Sweep The Leg Johnny."
"One of the great things about “hardcore emo” is that it is possible for an outstanding band of the genre to have a complete discography a little over twenty minutes long. Another great thing is that these furious, short songs combine chaos, melody and emotion together into the most exhilarating punk rock I’ve ever heard."
When I have more than a minute-and-a-half to spare, '43 Seconds’ (which is anything but) is my favourite Swing Kids song. At 4:25 long, it’s practically epic by Swing Kids standards – but not, it may be noted, by the standards of modern screamo bands – and most of this length stems from the ultra-quiet breakdown in the middle-to-end of the song. I’ve never seen anyone else write this, but I’m assuming the meaning of the song is a statistic of youth deaths or something along those lines:
“It's already been said by every god damn one.
They say it's only a statistic or something like that.
Just another kid on the beat, yeah.
But this doesn't even make sense.
Well that's just the point.”
The secret to this song – well, it’s a fairly obvious one – is the rolling bass line which it opens on, before the simple but frantic guitar is overlaid on top of it: a stuttering, tension-filled rhythm as “just another kid on the beat, yeah” reaches it’s emotion-filled crescendo, to drop down into first bass and drums, then rise back up again, then drop abruptly into a bass guitar solo; the silence broken only by increasingly slow bass notes and barely audible, swinging guitar counterpoint. When the song erupts for its final moments, it becomes all the more potent for the preceding quietness.
IV - the Swing Kids family tree
So it's not as lengthy or as diverse as the Hoover family tree, but the four members of Swing Kids also played and recorded in some other rather good bands.
Justin Pearson, of course, went on to the perhaps better or at least more widely known noise terrorism outfit The Locust. I saw them live here in Ireland last October in a memorably loud show at Whelans, with the notable Dublin metal/math-rock band Bats playing support. Pearson also played in several other Three One G bands such as The Crimson Curse, Some Girls, Holy Molar and Head Wound City, and the earlier political hardcore band Struggle. Naturally Swing Kids could themselves be described as political to some extent, but Struggle was more overtly so and also more traditionally a 'hardcore' band.
Eric Allen, as it has been mentioned here already, sadly died only a year after the break up of Swing Kids, but also played in Struggle as well as in the sxe group Unbroken. Jose Palafox also played in Struggle, Manumission, Mike Kirsch's group Bread and Circuits, and briefly for Yaphet Kotto.
Finally, John Brady was a member of Swing Kids contemporaries and sound-alikes Spanakorzo (they shared a split split EP, the Swing Kids side of which makes up a good deal of this discography.) Apparently Spanakorzo were much nicer people than Swing Kids. Brady then later went on to replace Matt Alicea as bassist for Sweep the Leg Johnny, the Karate Kid-inspired Chicago jazz/math-rock band that will quite possibly blow your mind. He joined them for their later two albums, the more aggressive and discordant Sto Cazzo! and the final Going Down Swingin' which added Mitch Cheney of like-minded math rock band Rumah Skagit as second guitarist/vocalist and also reprised songs from earlier albums. In addition, the original guitarist of Sweep the Leg, Chris Daly, played with Frederick Erskine (of Hoover/Abilene, if I even need to say that) in Just A Fire, whose sole album, 2003's Light Up, sounds like the missing link between Crownhate Ruin and the Boom. With some added dub/reggae.
With this previous post I started a collection of good music being released this year, the idea being to sum up each four months of the year. However, that isn't really what this is. For a start, this sums up the first eight months of the year on top of what I put in the first post, and the eighth month isn't even halfway through yet. However, it was a feature born out of impatience so don't be too surprised. Furthermore, I have divided the 'August' section into three to make it easier to write about and download (you'll see when it comes to the second part). Twelve songs in total, eleven artists - one artist had to have two songs, in a (very) similar fashion to last year. The first half (Pts. 1 & 2) are all US; the second half are all Irish.
3. Have A Nice Life – ‘Bloodhail’ from Deathconsciousness.
…Who Calls So Loud
...Who Calls So Loud are a new San Francisco-based screamo band with the drummer and guitarist of Funeral Diner, the former also the drummer of Portraits of Past. Going by the last.fm page on the band, the name comes from a passage of Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby, even if that doesn't explain the ellipsis. Either way, 'Sleeplike' is the first track from their self-titled EP which comes - exclusively - on a double 10" with a CD of the full album. This is good, so very good.
I've always been more for Envy or La Quiete than anything from American screamo of the last ten years or so, aside from Sinaloa - who also have a strong album out this year, featured in the previous list - but are not necessarily screamo in the same sense. Funeral Diner's Underdark it has to be said is a great album, almost of Envy quality, but I never liked it the way I'm liking the sound of this band. Its pedigree isn't everything, because ...Who Calls So Loud progresses quite welcomely to a newer style. (Portraits of Past 01010101 LP is really worth listening to as part of the late 90s-sound emo/screamo stuff, and has been also been released this year as part of a CD discography of the band.)
...Who Calls So Loud has that almost perfect balance between sweet melody and vicious, chaotic vocals that makes good screamo. It's a simultaneous creation of beauty out of destruction, out of collapse. Musically, it's not too heavy nor too slight for the genre; it begins with three epic-length screamo songs and then slips, bizarrely, into slide guitar - but throughout it remains utterly convincing and captivating.
Obscure screamo bands are not noted for their business acumen, but I'm still trying to work out the logic of the release format. The double 10" (above) is undoubtedly impressive, and my own copy is en route in the mail, but it's self-limiting to people who own a turntable; a group which I wasn't in myslef up until less than eight months ago. Of course, I downloaded the EP online in anticipation (as mentioned, the record does come with a CD of the tracks so you don't actually need to do that, or to rip from the vinyl). I'm guessing they've figured there's no money in producing a specific CD version, or artistically they didn't want to do so, but it would be nice to see it available on somewhere like eMusic so you could contribute to the artist without buying the vinyl or going to see a show (there's a European tour on about now, but nowhere nearer to me than UK venues.)
Mind you, their website just says under 'Merchandise':
::Go to a show and buy a shirt and a record. You will be a lot happier to get out of the house::
I admire the sentiment, but Manchester is bit far outside my house.
Vampire Weekend
Released somewhat earlier this year, Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut is a delicious blend of quirky indie rock, African rhythms, baroque strings, left-field humour, Anglophilia, simplicity, charm and some really catchy tunes. The influences aspect is the most talked-about, probably, and I discussed it here. 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' may not be the best track to illustrate the full VW sound, but it's a good one. I chose it as the only track from the first side of the album that hadn't been released as a single - and hence probably heard all over the radio - although now that it has a music video (see below) that might have changed. For the record, my favourite single is 'M79', and my favourite album track is the virtual companion piece 'Walcott'. Something about those string sections.
The video for 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' is a good way of getting into Vampire Weekend's influences, which I already said I wouldn't talk about. But anyway, ditch the over-emphasis on African polyrhythms, and dig the bizarre interplay between the cultures of east coast America and southern Britain. It's like a [stereotypical 80s] John Hughes movie mixed with the humour of [cult British comedy] Garth Marengi's Darkplace (of which the video's English director, Richard Ayoade, was part of, notably as 'smooth... like ice' Thornton).
Vampire Weekend is the premier indie rock album of the year, to my mind. It's sufficiently catchy to be pop; sufficiently quirky, offbeat, even adventurous, to be interesting; and sufficiently good all round to be enjoyable. 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' is a multi-layered, absorbing song; its lyrics may be oblique, but its rhythm is clear, and the inflection the singer, Ezra Koenig, puts into "is your bed made?" really makes the song for me.
Have A Nice Life
This double album has been out since early in the spring, but I guess it's been a while before I've been able to give Deathconsciousness the time it deserves. It's quite a sprawling, but densely textured and minimalist work. 'Bloodhail' is the second track from the first disc, and it's where the album first really picks up into loud statement - the preceding song is far more ambient, almost incidental but with themes and melodies which run into this song and on into the album. It's hard to categorize Have A Nice Life, but it's a sort of beyond post-hardcore sound mixed with heavy but relatively unobtrusive elements of shoegaze. It's subtle, perhaps too subtle to make an unambiguous impact without a lot of listening; but then that's just my experience, and other people seem to fall completely for it sooner. Last Train to Cool has a good piece about discovering the record as a piece of art, as a minimalist tour de force, while Geek Down talks more about the connection with post-hardcore - I've just started to understand about the contrapuntal vocals - and the technical elements. Read them both, and since you still won't know what Have A Nice Life sounds like, listen to this track.
Don't worry, no spoilers. I've only just seen the first two episodes, anyway. Listen to the track at the end of the post...
Hoover's been on my mind a bit lately, and it occurred to me that I left the band out of the previous post justifying The Wire's inclusion on this blog. Naturally, there's no direct or actual link (that I know of, anyway) but bear with me while I draw the connection. Starting with the image above, which is the long-running clip from The Wire's title sequence of police lights flashing in trickles of blood, with the colours changed to make it look somewhat reminiscent of the cover for Hoover's Lurid Traversal of Route 7.
To my mind, The Wire is the televisual equivalent of the dark, stupendous quality we have come to associate with the Hoover works. The Wire, too, has cult appeal which - however - has escaped the genre (crime) and achieved major media establishment acclaim. Neither of which, perhaps, has made it any more attractive to the average person, but at least it's getting recognition - and not only recognition, but interrogation - albeit of the critically positive kind.
It's probably grandiose to compare the Guardian, the Irish Times, Slate's belated love-fest over the final series of the TV show to my own scratchings on the topic of Hoover-related bands, but what the hell, I'll do it anyway. Over on Zen and the Art of Face Punching, I received a very nice compliment from another reader in the comments on the various attempts at description, eulogy and analysis that have made up the last 10 posts in that series. In jest I replied that I'd love to do a whole thesis on Hoover, from the perspective of post-hardcore as a movement in post-modern, post-materialist society (history and political science being my 'field' of study, so to speak). Nonsense, of course, but it ties in with the deep sense of meaning and art which I get from Hoover et al, and, The Wire.
At the end of every episode of The Wire, the screen goes black - it always feels far too soon - and the closing theme comes on. It's entitled 'The Fall' - post-lapsarian to our post-hardcore - and was composed by Blake Leyh, the show's music supervisor. Elsewhere, The Wire is packed full of interesting music, as befits its status as the most complex and realist show on television. There's the changing version's of Tom Wait's 'Way Down In The Hole', as mentioned before, that open the show; in cars and in houses, there is presumably carefully chosen music that reflects the characters - soul, r'n'b, hip-hop, country. It even works its way into the dialogue and action: like in the previous season, where assassins Chris and Snoop identify New York competitors in the drug dealing business by testing them on their knowledge of Baltimore club music; or where Bunny Colvin takes the corner kids out for a meal and has the Ella Fitzgerald in his car switched off in favour of rap music. Of course, that's just two examples.
But when it comes to making an artistic statement, it's that tune in the 'cold closing' of the show, in those half-unexpected moments of silence and emptiness, which hits the hardest. Nothing, and then the faint rattle of percussion, gradually growing louder and then joined, softly, with strings which are simultaneously stirring and mournful. It's flexible, rhythmic, and above all a little dubby: it always reminds me a little of 'Electrolux' or 'Regulator Watts', though of course to listen to those songs straight away destroys the illusion. In actual fact, in terms of space and cymbal-tapping awesomeness, it's quite like 'Cuts Like Drugs'. And the real, jazzy, soul- but also angst-filled version wouldn't be too out of place on Movin' Out by the Boom - a connection I made previously with 'Way Down In The Hole', which is however the stronger, brasher track of the episode opener/closer pair - while 'The Fall' is more meditative, slithering, ominous and thus, a little bit more Hoover-like:
Abilene's second album, Two Guns, Twin Arrows, is a post-hardcore record of many facets and signifances. In the canon of post-Hoover records, Two Guns is one of the most recent and also, overall, one of the very best. The very best, perhaps, after Radio Flyer (in my opinion) and depending how the mood takes you, Abilene's first album, or Until The Eagle Grins. It's also broadly speaking the first return, or anything approaching, to Hoover's Lurid Traversal of Route 7 - a point the fakejazz review below hints at strongly. Two Guns, Twin Arrows of course brings back together on record the two most prominent and artistically incendiary members of Hoover, Alex Dunham (Radio Flyer, Regulator Watts, Abilene) and Frederick Erskine (Crownhate Ruin, June of '44, HIM) on guitar/vocals and trumpet, respectively.
Beyond that, Two Guns, Twin Arrows is a reshaping of the sound of the self-titled Abilene album: the latter undoubtedly critically undervalued, six songs of slow-burning, tension-breaking minimalism; giving way to a longer set of bombastic, yet immensely subtle and sinuously winding combinations of trumpeting jazz and guitar-based post-hardcore (post-rock, even). My allegiance switches between both: the midsection of 'October' and 'Blackleg' from Abilene affects me almost like the greatest intensities of Slint's Spiderland; while the opening pair of Two Guns, Twin Arrows, 'Twisting the Trinity' and 'Blanc Fixe' sends my mind to opposite but similar excesses of post-rock wonder - perhaps what a third Slint album may have sounded like, though only with the addition of a virtuoso trumpeter and fellow member of a decade-old emo hardcore legend.
Two Guns, Twin Arrows is to the Hoover family tree a culmination and a rebirth, a reshaping of tense, rhythmic post-hardcore into a new movement of fire, jazz, distortion and feedback. Even without the hyperbole, this is a great and largely brilliant record; a little challenging to some, or perhaps all of us, but doubly rewarding in the end.
Below is a selecton of reviews and information about the album, while I pick up the discussion of the tracks again at the end: [or skip to the important news]
"Starting off with vocals that reach back to guitarist Alex Dunham's previous band Hoover, as well as original hardcore like Black Flag, Abilene embarks on a strange, jagged trip of an album that recasts shifting jazz as post-hardcore. What makes this record click where their debut fell short is the inclusion of June of 44's Fred Erskine on trumpet. On tracks like "Twisting the Trinity." Erskine tugs the song in the direction of free jazz -- Dunham, Scott Adamson, and William Ackerman first resist, but then the tune collapses into a fluid jazz sway. On "Blanc Fixe," Erskine assaults with his trumpet, calling in a smooth but piercing punk/jazz. "Fellini" sounds the most like Hoover, with Dunham shouting over spiraling riffs. It's hardly ambient, but you get the sense that is the direction Abilene is heading -- one of broad experimentalism with traditional instrumentation."
"We're reaching the tenth anniversary of a very important record... one where there probably won't be a special deluxe re-release... one that probably won't even get that much attention. Hoover's full length album, The Lurid Traversal of Route 7, came out on Dischord Records in August 1993.
The newer millennium finds Alex Dunham of Hoover leading the Chicago band Abilene. Abilene's self-titled album came out on Slowdime label a couple years back and was recorded only a few months after the band formed. As a result, the release was a bit uneven: a few songs were poweful rockers, delivered with an "in your face" vocal style, but the other songs were moody, half-done instrumentals. Abilene's new full length, Two Guns, Twin Arrows, finds the band tighter and more cohesive. And it also reunites Dunham with his old Hoover pal Fred Erskine.
While The Lurid Traversal of Route 7 won't get a two-cd reissue and get re-reviewed and re-appreciated, there's something better you can do to relive those long past glories. You can buy this goddam Abilene CD. On the bad side, time hasn't changed the Hoover boys very much. On the good side, time hasn't changed the Hoover boys very much. These are the same sounds which would later help define the "Louisville/Chicago sound" (odd given Hoover is from DC). The same dark, searing, powerful guitar sound. The same complex rhythms and liquid guitar and bass playing. The same depth-increasing use of space.
Erskine joins Abilene not to play bass but instead solely as a trumpet player. However, his trumpet playing is not merely a decoration; it is now an integral part of Abilene's sound. Some songs the trumpet carries the melody for extended portions, like in the album opening punch-in-the-face of "Twisting the Trinity." Some songs the trumpet is wrapped around Dunham's guitar, like in the scorching finale to "Blanc Fixe." Other times, it is warbling and humming, adding even more color or tension to an already dense composition.
While one could say that the addition of the trumpet lessens the impact of Dunham's vocals, that is more than made up for with the added density to the songs and the overall greater complexity and tightness to the arrangements. Dunham blasts into songs like "Fellini," screaming his lungs out. Earlier, that would be the most dominant sound in the song. However, now the guitar is even stronger and louder, the drums pound harder, and the trumpet injects a little humility, its softness evening out Dunham's pain and strain. With their second album, Abilene's songs now seem fully realized and fully balanced.
Perhaps I was mistaken when I called Bellini's Snowing Sun the last great 90s Touch and Go album. Abilene isn't that successful, but it's expertly crafted, dark and colorful. With artists like Abilene (who have now added Doug McCombs... imagine) and labels like 54'40" or Fight, perhaps the 90s Chicago sound will never leave us."
"Abilene calls into question the darker elements encountered in life, coupled with a positive aspect; consequently, both facets bind the music to a place centered on intensity and comfort. Abilene is essentially about ambient soundscapes." -Scott Holman, Copper Press (CP6).
"Formed in 1998, and originally consisting of Alex Dunham on guitar and vocals, Scott Adamson behind drums, and bassist Craig Ackerman, Abilene recorded and released a six-song slow-burner on the now-defunct Slowdime label. Before writing and recording Two Guns, Twin Arrows, Fred Erskine (June of '44, Hoover) joined to play trumpet, and the band evolved musically into something more dense, equally brooding, yet still ambient and subtle in nature.
Abilene's members have a prestigious musical past which has included such bands as June of '44, Hoover, Lustre King, Chisel.Drill.Hammer, Just a Fire, Radio Flyer and Regulator Watts.
Scott Adamson - Drums
Alex Dunham - Guitar, voice
Fred Erskine - Trumpet
Craig Ackerman - Bass
RIYL: Hoover, The Sorts, Fugazi, Lungfish, Johnboy, 90 Day Men, and Karate"
"Abilene’s second full-length, and first with Fred Erskine, is the album for which some critics pined when reviewing its much more mellow, spacious debut. “Three great songs, three OK ones,” they lamented, much to our surprise (we had it as five to one in Abilene’s favor). However, with Two Guns, Twin Arrows, Abilene has upped the ante, and slowly, one-by-one, laid eight aces across the table, all while maintaining a grim poker face.
Alex Dunham’s bristling yet atmospheric guitar playing and the subdued, complementary trumpeting of Erskine crest atop deep grooves as bassist Craig Ackerman and drummer Scott Adamson mine soul, dub and jazz for their subtle, fluid rhythms. At times, the players layout behind Erskine as he glides into passages informed by Freddie Hubbard and Don Cherry before the band shifts into states of transfixing tension-and-release. At others, Abilene is more insistent than ever, coursing manically through odd-time signatures beneath acrid lead guitar and shifting rhythmic tenacity. Still, at its core, it’s engaging ambient music for those who like it played with standard instrumentation. And no one does that like Abilene."
"Chicago based Abilene offer a brooding, dark and well-constructed album incorporating the expected instruments alongside a more unexpected trumpet advantage. This brass incorporation lands the band somewhere in the realm of post-hardcore meets jazz whereas songs deftly mix a seemingly quiet impromptu with more determined musical aggression in “Blanc Fix” and “Twisting the Trinity.” Creative, dark, tense and well balanced from the late Hoover bandmates Alex Dunham Fred Erskine. Bravo. - Wonka Vision
Two Guns and Twin Arrows are (two separate) places in the state of Arizona along the famous Route 66; Twin Arrows marks the intersection between Route 66 and the supplanting I-40. They are pretty bleak rest stops now, as the photographs (from studio-chimera.com and blogs.trucktrend.com) testify.
And of course Abilene is itself, among other things, the name of a city in Texas.
[The news: here (in the comments) and also here, that Hoover are actually playing a show in London on August 27 (with Bluetip), and also in Spain at the St. Feliu festival. Mega awesomeness.]
I
Opener ‘Twisting The Trinity’ serves as a clear introduction to the revised, new Abilene sound: cacophonous opening guitar continues for a few bars, then trumpet, vocals, and finally the rhythm section comes in; all layered, spacious as on Abilene but instantly noisier. Then it goes quiet again, though Erskine returns with relatively gentle phrases on the trumpet, introducing a recognizably jazzy sound to the album. The second track, ‘Blanc Fixe’, steps this element of the music up; at first, winding, soaring phrases with a strangely Eastern feel; before Dunham kicks back in with vocals, again heavier than before on the previous album, but with a similar underlying kind of feel. ‘Blanc Fixe’ soars back into the sort of agonizing cacophony - and believe me when I say I mean that in the best possible way - that establishes itself at the heart of this album. On the Hoover Mixtape I wrote of 'Twisting The Trinity' - though this in fact applies better to 'Blanc Fixe' - "The winding, slightly exotic or Oriental melodies of Erskine's trumpet meld with the surprisingly heavy guitars to produce a viscerally powerful and energetic sound."
‘Fitch’ returns more prominently to the guitar, heavily accented on the downstroke, underlaid with subtle trumpeting while lyrically the song shouts "Fitch!", with both guitar and voice. Here, the trumpet is colour in the background, in the empty space between action and over the soft rhythm. As the song rises and falls, the trumpet for the most part acts as counterpoint to the guitar. ‘Ghost Writer’, the fourth track, is an extremely quiet song, like those on the first album, but with added For Carnation-like flourishes - both in the texture of the guitars and in the ambient noise.
II
'Fellini' opens up the album again into a loud, aggressive sound. It's a good song to illustrate why Two Guns, Twin Arrows might be a better album than Abilene, like Hoover but also not like Hoover in the strength and reach of its dynamics: playing descending trumpet and ascending guitar off against each other, and vice versa. The songs swells and levels out, finally in a swirling, perfectly balanced blend of jazz and post-hardcore.
'Apache Country' begins in similar, but far quieter, fashion; rolling drums, soft vocals, an alternately clarion and smokey trumpet segue into For Carnation-like post-rock spaciousness. Post-rock not in the grandiose sense, but in the incredibly tense, finely textured style exhibited amongst other settings on the aforementioned group's self-titled album. 'Phase Four' almost extends the comparison, branching out into simultaneously ambient and intrusive electronics - all very Hoover-ish, though seemingly out of place on this album - with what can only be described as gnarled but impassioned vocals.
The final song, 'Solidarity' is I'm told is a reaction to September 11th and its consequences - Two Guns, Twin Arrows was released in 2002. The lyrics don't begin for a minute or two, after a winding trumpet section; but as they do, they unfold in unison between Dunham and Erskine, over a relatively simple, rhythmic guitar riff before the song soars back into instrumental candour - candour in expression, carefully judged and balance, though not without weight and feeling. In fact, it sounds quite different from the Hoover of just under ten years previous, slightly more calming than cathartic. 'Solidarity' is, when considered carefully, a rather moving and quite concise - at just over four minutes - conclusion to the album and, stylistically, a return to the opening sounds of 'Twisting the Trinity' and 'Blanc Fixe'.
"a black light has fallen fate outlined this morning inside we saw the bleeding with faith, outside we cried a black light has fallen retell the morning resell the time your faith's outside divisions been drawn and made justice with flags a-wavin', a stop-gap never seen patriot start selling a hollow unity"
The wisdom of dead Germans
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First as tragedy, then as farce? There's nothing to be found in Victorian
ideologies.
Are there self-identified "farces" I should view that meet the criter...
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Hey! I entered a tee shirt for submission at Threadless.
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If it wins...
Murder By Death/O'Death Split 7"
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"Murder By Death are releasing the first of 7 records in a 7" series where
they trade covering songs with other bands they know. The second 7" will
featu...
