ARCHERS OF LOAF: TOLSTOY'S LAST STAND

Originally published in B-Side (April/May 1994)

During my years of writing for B-Side magazine, the editors imposed several silly style rules.  One was to refer to musicians by their first names.  (Had they interviewed Dylan, they’d have written, “Bob bristles when asked for the millionth time to explain ‘Desolation Row’”).  Another was never to write “said” or “says” in a direct-quotation tag, even though writing anything else usually causes readers to pay undue attention to the verbs.

As originally published, the piece that follows adhered to those two rules.  As slightly edited below, I’ve amended most of the quotation tags.  I have not, however, changed the first-names approach because, oddly enough, it seems to work in this context.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy what you’re about to read.  

* * * * *

Those who track the movements of alternative music’s restless muse tell us that Chapel Hill, North Carolina, qualifies as one of several college towns in contention for the title of the “next Seattle” (a title formerly known as the “next Minneapolis” and the “next Athens”).  These muse trackers cite as prime evidence Icky Mettle, the Alias Records debut of the sub-poppier-than-thou Chapel Hill racket makers Archers of Loaf, three of whom inaugurated their Christmas season by phoning this magazine from their manager’s house for a short winter’s chat and, simultaneously, watching Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.

“Oh!  Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer with Burl Ives is comin’ on!” exclaims Matt Gentling, the band’s bassist, in the middle of his fellow Archer Eric Johnson’s explanation of how he makes his guitar sound like an air-raid siren on the song “Hate Paste.” 

“That’s that little noise thing that Eric made,” observes the drummer, Mark Price.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” says Eric.  “It’s a delay peddle—”

“The claymation bit!” Matt interrupts.

“He wants to know about my brilliance, guys!” Eric objects.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Matt.

“O.K.  What I do,” says Eric, “for the kids out there—”

“I want to be a dentist!” Matt interrupts again, mimicking the misfit elf on TV.

“—who reads this can take my advice ’cause I’m a guitar—”

“Wizard,” says Matt.

“—connoisseur,” says Eric.

“What were you saying about the drummer?” says Mark.

Matt cracks up.  Eric tries again.

“What I was sayin’ is—”

“Shut up!” shouts Mark.  

Matt cracks up again.

You get the idea.  One would hardly mistake an interview with the Loaf for an episode of Firing Line.  “We might as well go ahead and warn you that we always confuse interviewers,” says Eric (whom we shall henceforth refer to as “Eric J.” to avoid confusing him with the band’s lead-singing lyricist, Eric Bachmann).  “We’re very sarcastic.  Beware.”

Back to the air-raid-siren guitar sounds on “Hate Paste.”

“O.K.,” resumes Eric.  “What you do is you take the delay time and turn it all the way down, and then you take the repetition and turn it all the way up.”

“Then you get a dual motor crossover,” adds Mark.

“What you get is a sub-divided matrix,” adds Matt.

“What happens,” says Eric J., “is it’s impossible to have no delay time in a repeat.  So the peddle just starts, like, makin’ all this noise, and if you have a fresh battery in there—”

“It’ll cook,” says Matt.

“—it’ll start screamin’, and boy does that get me off!”

Matt cracks up again.

“Print that,” says Matt.  “That’s a good quote.”

One should not assume from such banter that “Hate Paste” is the only Icky Mettle track to feature skronky guitar sounds.  Indeed, all thirteen songs—from the catchy, previously-available-as-45s “Web in Front” and “Wrong” to the downright entropic “Fat” and “Backwash”—bulge with the shrieks of tortured amps.  But just as essential are Eric Bachmann’s weird lyrics and the plaintively hoarse way that he shouts them in a sometimes vain attempt to be heard over the aforementioned guitars.  It was, in fact, the coming together of the two Erics in late ’91 that launched the entire Loaf concept, giving the quartet’s on-again, off-again involvement in various combos going back to high school a splattery, post-punk shape.

Eric B.’s absence on this night precluded questions about what he means when he sings lines such as “All I ever wanted was to be your spine.”  But Matt, Mark, and Eric J. have plenty to say about their frontman nevertheless, starting with the “intellectual” look lent him by his wire-rimmed glasses.

“It’s his Russian-novel reading,” says Matt.

“He’s really into reading Russian novels,” says Eric J.

“He has a big tattoo on his butt that says ‘Pain,’” says Mark.

“Yeah, exactly,” says Matt, “because that’s—”

“That’s what it’s all about,” says Mark.

The trio’s discussion then moves on to the topic of Eric B.’s lyrics, lyrics that, although Matt, Mark, and Eric J. did not feel at liberty to discuss them, they discussed anyway.

“Um, I mean, we hate them,” says Matt, “and you can tell him that.”

“We try to keep them all the way down in the mix,” says Mark.

“We’re looking for a new frontman,” says Matt, “so if you have any suggestions—”

How about Randy Bachman? 

“From Bachman-Turner Overdrive?  He’d be a frontman-and-a-half.  You don’t happen to know his number, do you?”

Icky Mettle hit the stands on September 13, approximately six months after Archers of Loaf signed to Alias Records.  The Alias A&R man John Wells heard the band’s first single, “Wrong” b/w “South Carolina” on the Stay Free label, and came to see the Archers play.  Before long, they’d joined the Alias roster.  And although it was recorded in March 1993, Icky Mettle still represents, according to Eric J. and Matt, what the band does onstage.  

“We’ve evolved,” says Eric J., “but not very far.”

“We’ve evolved from one side to the other,” laughs Matt, “not necessarily up or down.”

“I think we’ve gotten better.”

“Like, we’ve gotten a million times better, I think.  But as far as the songs that we’re recording now, it’s weird.  We have a couple of singles about to come out, and those are a pretty even mix of brand-new songs and really old songs.”

Broaching the subject of Eric B.’s lyrics again, Matt manages an at least half-serious appraisal.

“I like his lyrics because they’re pretty open to interpretation.  Usually, they mean something personal to him, but you can’t get too specific about them because they weren’t intended that way, I don’t think, unless maybe for his own use.

“‘Web in Front,’ however,” he says on second thought, “does refer to an obscure Russian novel.”

The other news about the Archers has to do with the seven-week tour that they completed just after Thanksgiving.  It amounted to their most extensive jaunt ever.  And while it provided plenty of thrills, it also provided monotony and exhaustion.

“The first two weeks felt like four weeks,” says Eric J., “and then the third week felt like a week-and-a-half.  And then the fifth week felt like just a week.  The seventh week felt like three weeks.”

“So in total,” Matt calculates, “it felt as if we were gone six months.”

And for those who still need a reason to trudge out and see the Loaf when they next hit the road in the spring, the following observation might serve as the ultimate motivator: They sound a lot like the Replacements probably did between Hootenanny and Let It Be.

“When I went to high school, they were like my personal messiahs,” Matt recalls.  “I worshiped them.  They’re like a significant portion of my life.  Yeah, that’s cool as hell, man.  I don’t mind being linked with them at all.”

Nor should those interested in the sound of the next Seattle mind being linked with Archers of Loaf, whether by concert ticket, CD player, or a love for Rudolph. 

  

Martha Bayles: Hole in Our Soul (1994)

(As published in WORLD ... )

HOLE IN OUR SOUL: THE LOSS OF BEAUTY AND MEANING IN AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC, by Martha Bayles, The Free Press, 453 pages, $25.

“The central argument of Hole in Our Soul," writes Martha Bayles in her book's first chapter, "is that the anarchistic, nihilistic impulses of perverse modernism have been grafted onto popular music, where they have not only undermined the Afro-American tradition, but also encouraged today's cult of obscenity, brutality, and sonic abuse."

While popular books by Rush Limbaugh and the late Allan Bloom have made similar arguments, Bayles' book is the one that will most likely have a serious impact on those whose opinions influence the way serious music lovers think: professors in liberal arts programs and professional music critics.

For one thing, unlike Limbaugh and Bloom, Bayles is hard to caricature. As a graduate of, and teacher at, Harvard, and as someone who's published articles in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, she's both a product of and a participant in liberalism's intellectual mainstream. She's also a woman who matured in or at least near the '60s, all of which makes her a difficult target for those whose arsenals consist mainly of the labels "right-wing," "patriarchal," and "reactionary."

In addition, she writes like a conservative. For although she takes pains to distinguish herself from social conservatives (who suffer from "genteel old-fashioned American philistinism"), neoconservatives (whose allies "suspect, without knowing much about it, that art is bad for 'family values'"), and libertarian conservatives (whose "opposition to censorship is matched by support for the legalization, without regulation, of pornography"), she directs her most lengthy and articulate arguments against liberals--multiculturalists and postmodernists especially.

"Multiculturalists wouldn't dream of asking non-Western peoples to give up their own standards of excellence," she writes. "That demand is reserved for the West, where it's no longer enough to admit that racial and sexual bias has historically led to mistaken negative judgments. Now the West's positive judgments must be damned as well, and its noblest works reduced to a residue of prejudice."

Similarly, according to Bayles, postmodernists--or "perverse modernists," the term she prefers--seek to sever the present from the best of the past. "Too often artistic modernism has sought ... a repeal of morality--in the name of the radical freedom needed to create a radical new culture ... without any of the old culture's imperfections." Elsewhere Bayles is clear to number Christianity among those pillars of Western civilization that perverse modernists are foolish to try to topple.

But Hole in Our Soul's greatest strengths are the author's genuine love for American popular music and her understanding of the history of esthetics, a history she summarizes better than any commentator in recent memory. In the chapter titled "Three Strains of Modernism," she traces the philosophy of art from Plato and Aristotle--both of whom saw art as subordinate to truth--to "the rationalists of the Enlightenment," who severed truth from both religion and art and "put art on the defensive." From there she follows art through Romanticism and the early Victorian period (when, as common enemies of science, religion and poetry became confused with each other) to Symbolism and Naturalism, which retreated from and denounced the world, respectively.

"[B]ecause both impulses," she writes, "are fundamentally antagonistic toward life as it is actually lived, their interaction ... precipitated a plunge into artistic perversity."

In this Bayles lays the groundwork for her detailed discussions of the developments of jazz, gospel, R&B, and soul, Afro-American music forms whose histories she convincingly reconstructs based on her understanding of what she calls the "blood knot," i.e., the complicated relationship between whites and blacks in the United States, particularly the South. According to Bayles, no theory of American popular music that oversimplifies this relationship makes sense. She argues, for instance, contrary to the popular myth, that instead of white culture exploiting black culture for the benefit of a few, both cultures have consistently exploited each other for the benefit of everyone. Hence her use of the term "Afro-American" in the first place.

Bayles also finds in Afro-American music a complex and essentially stoic worldview that incorporates humility, irony, and humor, a worldview that today's "gansta" rappers and many white dilettantes have reduced to nothing more than a passion for animalistic sex and violence. Her skill at articulating the true virtues of Afro-American music makes Hole in Our Soul as valuable in terms of positive, optimistic criticism as it is in terms of the negative.

The book's weakness is Bayles' inability to see anything at all of the Afro-American qualities she extols in the music of those she distrusts. With the exceptions of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and U2, this includes almost every well-known pop musician from 1965 to the present. By grounding her criticism of the Rolling Stones and Madonna, for instance, in an examination of their publicity stunts instead of their songs, she leaves herself open to the charge that she doesn't always listen closely to the music she dislikes. Even National Review had a few sober good words for the rappers Ice-T and Sister Souljah in the heat of their 1992 controversies.

That aside, Hole in Our Soul represents the clearest and most coherent explanation to date for why so many serious people experience ambivalence or confusion when confronted with American popular music, and why we can and should go beyond the muddle "to trace the roots of our present predicament to their true sources in the larger culture." When we do, according to Bayles, we'll discover why we dislike the music we dislike. We'll also discover that the music most worth listening to is the music that "does not pursue the goal of innovation to enervating, self-destructive, or nihilistic extremes."

"Above all," she concludes, "it does not forget that its original purpose was to affirm the humanity of a people whose humanity was being denied."

Killing Joke: Cruisin' for a Bruisin' (1994)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

All right, Generation X-ers, it's like this: way back when Helmet and Tool were giving their grade-school teachers fits and Ministry was just a synth-pop duo, England's Killing Joke was already laboring mightily in the service of the apocalypse with a massive, clanging clamor that reverberated like the screams of the damned inside Lucifer's skull.


Never mind that in 1983 a scribe at Britain's Record Mirror called them "[d]ull, dreary, drab, droning, dowdy dullards."

He was wrong.

Actually, he was part right. Killing Joke were "droning." But dull, dreary, and dowdy? Them's fightin' words, mate! Just ask Jaz Coleman, the Joke's thirty-four-year-old lead singer, lyricist, and all-'round Sinister Presence.

"We're fucking great!" he barks. "You should see us. We kicked people's backsides yesterday hard, until they were bruised."

Coleman, ensconced in an Amsterdam hotel room like the big star he is--especially in Europe--is referring to a seventy-five-minute set Killing Joke recently played outdoors before forty thousand frenzied Belgians. The quartet breathed fire into tracks from their new Zoo album, Pandemonium and, as proof of their stature, were joined on the bill by no less than Elvis Costello and Iggy Pop.

Oh, and INXS.

"But,” says Coleman, “everybody left when they came on."

"We played a blinding concert," he continues. "It went down a storm. The place was just rocking. So we're happy. I'm in my Amsterdam hotel room with Geordie and Youth and friends, and we're having a fucking ball. We've made our mark. We've influenced generations. Who can deny it? Now we're just enjoying it. What are you doing?"

He has a point. Killing Joke has influenced generations, and nowhere is that influence more apparent than on Pandemonium. It‘s the group's tenth album and its first in a dozen years to feature the original lineup: Coleman, the aforementioned Geordie and Youth (on guitar and bass respectively), and Big Paul Ferguson on drums. Far from dreary, drab, and dull, Pandemonium foams at the jowls with state-of-the-art punk-metal throbbings, making it the logical next purchase for those who consider Ministry's Psalm 69 the last word in bedlam.

"It feels like the first album," Coleman says. "It's just the beginning, mate. It's our debut album. You'd better fucking believe it!"

But what, exactly, is it the beginning of?

"It's the beginning of mastery,” says Coleman, “a high level of articulacy. We are going to explode with this particular time in history. This is ours for the fucking taking, mate. I can smell it. The band smells blood."

To get some idea of how Coleman sounds as he's making these pronouncements, imagine the World Wrestling Federation's Undertaker with a British accent. To get some idea of how Coleman sounds when he throws his head back and sings these days, imagine Monstro the Whale after too much chili sauce--a condiment, incidentally, that just might be the one thing Coleman would just as soon praise as his band.

"I'm a bit of a connoisseour of the old fried chili pepper," he digresses. "So is Geordie. There's this mind-blowingly good chili sauce you get in New Zealand"--Coleman's adopted country--"called Kai Taia Fire. It has little flames on the front, like a tabasco sauce bottle, but it shits over tabasco.

“Don't you like refinement in life, the refinement of taste buds, of literature, of music, of everything? I do. I don't feel guilty about any of that shit. I order the most expensive wines, and I never travel economy."

Where were we?

Oh yeah, Pandemonium. The word itself means "demons everywhere," and sure enough, the album's ten songs feature doomy musings like "Extinction seems to be a plausible risk" (“Millennium”), "Globalism and the U.N. neutralized by ethnic cleansing" ("Mathematics of Chaos"), and "Try getting me out / in a transient phase / at the end of an age / running through this maze" ("Labyrinth").

The highlights, however, are the rip-roaring shout-fest "Whiteout" and "Exorcism," the vocal of which not only qualifies as Coleman's most throat-clearingly intense of the album but was also recorded in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

"Bribes," admits Coleman when asked how they booked the session. "We made some connections, and we got away with it. Can you imagine having the whole of the Great Pyramid to yourself, walking up into the King's Chamber through this massive corridor?

“You think about the people who originally built that place and the things that've happened there--it was a mind-blowing experience, a strange, wonderful experience. I just ran free without any written lyrics. The whole thing was like some huge release. We did it there to ritualize that moment in our lives. It was an explosive album. It was just absolute collisions. Pandemonium was the right name for the album. Absolute chaos. Gorgeous chaos."

And throughout it all blasts Coleman's voice.

"My range is a tone higher than it used to be," he declares. "I feel a lot more fucking power in it. Fuck! I can let rip in this room and everybody would put their fingers in their ears. I've got a loud voice, and it's got a nice, high edge to it now. I can let rip, man! Just hammer it hard as fuck."

All of which translates into good news for Killing Joke--and for anyone who’d like to know how it feels to be on the receiving end of a lethal punch line.

North: Genocidal World (1994)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

North
Genocidal World
(Eatin')

You've heard the expression "So bad it's good"? Well, North's Genocidal World is so bad it's horrible. Not that as devotees of apocalyptic Christianity and industrialized metal they don't have a right to express themselves for thirty-six minutes, but where did they get the idea to follow the last track with another thirty-six minutes--of the entire album in reverse? True, Don Grillo's backward rock-operatic yowling makes the end of the world more tolerable than his frontward rock-operatic yowling does if only because backwards you can't understand lyrics like "We're a filthy plague / Knocking down on heaven's door / Leaving festering wounds to grow / Into future wars," lyrics that make you wish the world would end--or the song, whichever might come first. Something tells me that wasn't the apocalyptic effect this Glendale Heights, Illinois, quartet intended.

Randy Stonehill: Street Level-Headed (1994)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Syndicate ... )

The last time we spoke with Randy Stonehill, he had just completed Wonderama, his Terry Taylor-produced album from 1991. Aglow with satisfaction, Stonehill couldn't wait to work with Taylor again.

So why did he head to Nashville to record his new album, The Lazarus Heart, and get Jimmy Lee Sloas (PFR, the Imperials, Whitecross) to produce it when Sloas has never even been in DA, the Swirling Eddies, or Lost Dogs? And why is The Lazarus Heart on Street Level Records, a label whose imprint last surfaced when Larry Norman reissued Only Visiting This Planet in 1978?

The new Street Level, it turns out, has little to do with the old, which was more artist agency than record label anyway. Norman sold the rights to the name years ago, and Street Level Artists went on to represent many of Christian rock's finest.

Street Level Records is Stonehill's baby.

"I don't want to put down big record companies," says Stonehill, who spent seventeen years with Word's Myrrh Records, "but there's a tendency with big companies to let a lot of people handle the decisions, and your worth loses something in the translation.

At forty-two--i.e., several years past the mid-way point of his biblically allotted threescore and ten--Stonehill realizes more acutely than ever the need to redeem the time. And that there are worse ways to redeem it than by going for broke.

"I want to boil it down," he says, "and return a bit to the idealism and simplicity of the grass-roots days of this whole industry."

If anyone should know about the "grass-roots days," it's Stonehill. His first album, Born Twice, was released on the underground One Way label, and his next two were released on Larry Norman's seminal DIY label, Solid Rock. But despite the disillusionment he experienced when Solid Rock imploded in the early '80s, Stonehill still traces his Street Level vision to those more innocent times.

"I embrace a comparison between Solid Rock and Street Level," he says. "But I think one of the key differences will be that, at Street Level, all the major decisions will be made by a group--the company's three co-owners and I. And we have a board of directors, as well, as opposed to all that weight resting on one man's shoulders.

"Larry, as gifted as he is in many ways, is a fallible person, just like anybody else. As a matter of fact, in those days I'd sometimes feel bad for him when I saw how exhausted he was and how this company, which seemed to be a good idea at the start, had become such a weight. It seemed like more of a burden than a pleasure."

If anything, the music on The Lazarus Heart is the sound of burdens being lifted. Pop melodies waft through a graceful mixture of ballads and rockers, with only the tossed-off "Zurich in the Snow" to remind longtime Stonehill fans of his youthful penchant for the goofy.

And unlike Wonderama, where songs like "Barbie Nation," "Rachel Delevoryas," and "Great Big Stupid World" directed the album's energy toward external topics and situations, The Lazarus Heart finds Stonehill mining himself.

Like Wonderama, The Lazarus Heart finds Stonehill collaborating. The last time it was Taylor with whom he shared composer credits; this time it's Rick Elias, Phil Madeira, and Dave Perkins.

And the collaborating didn't stop with the songwriting. No sooner had recording started than word got out, and before Stonehill knew it, lots of Nashville talent began to drop by. "It sort of turned," he says, "into a musical party."

The partiers included Phil Keaggy (who played guitar spot on "Under the Rug"), Madeira (who contributed dobro and accordion), Gary Chapman (who loaned Stonehill guitars and sang), and Out of the Grey's Christine Dente (whom Stonehill calls his all-time favorite female vocalist"). And despite the cameos, the album sounds neither cluttered nor propped up.

Cynics, however, might conclude that the guest spot by CCM's hottest male solo performer--Michael W. Smith--on "In Jesus' Name" makes Stonehill look at least a little like a coattail-riding opportunist.

"I really thought it was the right artistic decision," says Stonehill. "As I was going over the song, I turned to Jimmy and said, 'Boy, you know what? Smitty's voice is the right one for this.'

Stonehill knows that Smith's presence won't hurt sales. But he laughs at the thought that anyone would consider it a "crass, shameless marketing ploy."

"Stylistically, what Smitty and I do is a good bit different," he admits. "When I first met him on the [1984] Amy [Grant] tour, he said, 'Now, you won't remember this, but I met you when I was seventeen at a Contemporary Christian music seminar. I came up to you and told you that I played piano and that I had dreams of having a music ministry some day. And you listened to me and gave me some advice and were really encouraging. That galvanized my resolve to do this thing.' So it was really nice that all these years later he really wanted to jump in with me on that song."

Besides, Stonehill says, one of the purposes of The Lazarus Heart was to defy expectations. "I wanted to mix things up a little bit, to shake it all down and try new stuff. And with this record I really think that came to fruition."

One aspect of the album that longtime Stonehill fans will find familiar is his confessional honesty. In "Remember My Name" and "When I'm Afraid," he lays bare his doubts about God. And in the un-ironically titled "That's Why We Don't Love God," he goes even further.

"I don't think of it as a dark song," Stonehill insists. "But the fact of the matter is, we carry far too much unnecessary weight on our shoulders by pretending that once Jesus has come into our lives our humanity is all aligned with him and that our love is as true as his, that we always have the victory. We know we should love God. We'd like to love God. So darn it! We're going to smile broadly, sing about it, raise our hands, and everything.

“But the prime example that should free us from having to parade this facade around is Paul. Here's a guy responsible for writing about half of the New Testament, but he himself said, 'The very thing I want to do, I don't do, and often the very thing I don't want to do, I end up doing.'

“The beauty there, which I was trying to communicate in that song, is in that most painful, naked moment when you can almost hear God's voice saying, 'Don't you think I know? I know you better than you'll ever know yourself because I made you, and I love you relentlessly.' When we recognize the purity and power of that mercy, that's the one thing that finally breaks our sinful hearts in a good way. And our love for God starts to come alive."

For those with ears to hear, Stonehill obviously still has a lot left to say. It's amazing then to realize that, had he not founded Street Level Records, he might never have made his new album at all.

"I wondered," he admits, "after seventeen years with Word and having them let me go, if I would find myself standing on a street corner with my hat in my hand, saying, 'Uh, remember me? I was one of the pioneers of contemporary Christian music. Hey! Does anybody care?'"

Judging from his reception in Nashville, lots of people do. But Stonehill views both the good and the bad with equanimity.

"God will either let the ship of my career continue to float or he'll sink it," he reflects. "And if he sinks it, it'll be painful, but I can accept that.

“What I won't be able to live with is being haunted in my old age by wondering what could've happened with my ministry and music if only I'd trusted him more."

Seefeel: Music to Wash Up To (1994)

(As published in B-Side ... )

For the past year-and-a-half, British critics have waxed inventive in trying to describe the techno, tabula-rasa-from-the-hearts-of-space sound of the three lads and a lass from London known as Seefeel.

"[O]ver a foetal-heartbeat bassline,” wrote Simon Reynolds, “billowing cirrus-swirls ... weave together to form a shimmering outerspace/innerspace wombscape."

You get the idea.

One phrase, however, continues to surface.

"The words 'ambient noise' keep coming up," says Sarah Peacock, Seefeel's twenty-four-year-old siren. "I don't have any objection to that in itself. But we don't start off with a genre and then make the music to fit it, you know?"

In other words, if Seefeel's two U.S. longplayers, Polyfusia and Quique, sound like ambient music to you, fine. But Peacock, Mark Clifford (guitar and gadgetry), Daren Seymour (bass and gadgetry), and Justin Fletcher (percussion and gadgetry) didn't plunge into the burbly, non-verbal waters of synthetic effervescence for that reason. No, sir. They did it because--well, why did they do it?

"Some people have said it's very good music to wash up to," Peacock says, "but I hope people dance. When we play live, certainly people do get down and shake their things."

She laughs at her use of disco lingo. After all, nothing could be further from Saturday Night Fever than Seefeel's hypnotic, sub-verbal, cumulus clouds of tape-doctored sound, could it?

"Well, but there's always a groove to it. Everything we do has something about it that you can move to if it's loud enough, if the circumstances are right. I've got no objection to somebody's chilling out to it or whatever, but that's not why we make it, really. The stuff that turns us on is usually exciting stuff, stuff that makes you want to dance. That's what I want, certainly.

“I mean, sure, we have got some stuff, I suppose, like 'Signals' on Quique, that hasn't got any beat. You couldn't really dance to that. But I hope our music is more kind of head-fuck ambience than chill-out ambience, if you like. We want it to be challenging rather than background music. Yeah."

Like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music?

"Um, I'm sure I've probably heard some Tangerine Dream," Peacock equivocates, "but I haven't got any of their records. That was well before my time."

Quique (pronounced keek) and Polyfusia (a compilation of two pre-Quique EPs) have washed ashore courtesy of Caroline, but Peacock says Seefeel's future projects will bear the Warp Records imprint, probably in conjunction with one of the major labels that Warp is currently negotiating with. Meanwhile, those with London connections can already purchase two post-Quique discs: the "Starethrough"/"Filter Dub"/"Signals" twelve-inch and the official Starethrough EP.

But, commerce aside, just how does Seefeel generate its sounds?

"A lot of it is done with a sampler," Peacock explains, "pretty much nearly all of it. But the things that we sample are created by ourselves rather than taken off other records. We'll sort of make up percussion sounds and little pieces of effected guitar and things like that, sped up, slowed down, messed around with on the sampler, and usually repeated and looped. Then we'll add bass lines and vocals."

Are Peacock's diaphanous, wraith-like vocals sped up and messed around with too?

"Um, never all that much, no. I mean, there'll be a bit of delay and a bit of reverb. I think 'Charlotte's Mouth' on Quique had a bit of the weird effects on it--I was singing through a guitar amp--but it's never usually very much."

And what does she make of the notion that says the more techno the instruments, the less emotional the songs?

"I think that's bollocks, really. We put a lot of emotion into our music. You can be totally passionate with a sampler. You can bang keys on a keyboard, and it can be, you know, straight from the heart just as much as thrashing on a guitar or singing the blues, as long as you're setting out to be yourself and be honest about what you're doing, which we are, I hope, in our striving to be something different.

"We are trying to be really honest with that, you know. And I hope we succeed."

Atomic Opera: For Madmen Only (1994)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Syndicate ... )

Atomic Opera
For Madmen Only
(Collision Arts)

Those who've wondered what Sam Taylor would do after splitting with King's X and Galactic Cowboys need wonder no more: In Atomic Opera, he's found yet another group of long-haired, harmony-singing, Christian headbangers from Houston who ply their trade on a secular label (a Warner Bros. affiliate this time) and who indulge their penchant for songs averaging over five minutes as lustily as they do their disenchantment with evangelicaldom. "I'm sick of holy freaks / who say it all so well," sings Frank Hart in "I Know Better." And in "War Drum," doubling as lead guitarist, he does to "Onward, Christian Soldiers" what Jimi Hendrix did to "The Star-Spangled Banner." On the faith-affirming side are the liner notes ("Gloria Patri Filli E Et Spiritus Sanctus"), the cover art (stained glass with band initials doubling as Alpha and Omega letters), and the latest deafeningly joyful hammer-and-anvil noises to emerge from Taylor's Texas forge.

DeGarmo & Key: Extreme As They Wanna Be (1994)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Syndicate ... )

O.K., so Syndicate has taken the sixteen-year Christian-rock veterans Eddie DeGarmo and Dana Key to task for being jingoistic and superficial from time to time.

Er, make that often.

But that was then and this is now. Not that they don’t write jingoistically and superficially anymore, but they’ve gotten really good at it--as their new album, To Extremes (Benson), amply proves. At its best, it ripples with muscular, bluesy hard rock and lyrics forged in the heat of the struggle to live a holy life.

"We feel that our lyrics are intriguing," says DeGarmo. "If they weren't we wouldn't get the thousands of letters that we get every year."

"At the same time," adds Key, "We don't want it to take somebody an hour to figure out what we're trying to say in a three-minute song. We're in the business of communicating a message, and we want to make it as clear and unmistakable as possible."

Proof that they've succeeded in their mission can be found both in the number of award nominations they've racked up--three Doves and six Grammys so far--and in their impressively detailed Christian radio track record, a record to which To Extremes has already added. "Judgment Day" recently reached the top five, and "Stressed," one of the hardest, bluesiest DeGarmo & Key singles ever, will probably do the same.

"I'm proud of the fact that we've had over sixty top-ten radio songs in our career," says Key. "And I'm also proud that while our albums may have three or four radio singles on them, there are also seven or eight songs on there that have a great deal of depth."

"I don't think you can really make records predicting what you think other people will like,” says DeGarmo. " I think you can only make records of what you like and hope that other people will like them. We just do what we do best. I mean, we're definitely blues-influenced and rock-influenced. We're not a really good pop band, and we're not a really good rap band. But we are a pretty good rock band."

Some have wondered then, if indeed D&K's strengths do indeed consist in making "really good rock," why the duo continues to write for teens, for whom "rap" and "pop" rule. To many, after all, D&K are as famous by now for their youth-group musicals as they are their rock-and-roll muscle.

"Most forty-year-olds are paying on a mortgage, not buying rock music," says Key. "And most people, by the time they're twenty-five, have made most of their spiritual decisions. So it's important for us to reach people while they're young."

The implication is that perhaps some of contemporary Christian music's more self-consciously "alternative" bands aren't trying to reach people, that by trying not to proclaim their faith in an old-fashioned way, these bands may not be proclaiming it at all.

"Not only don't they say anything," insists Key, "but nobody knows that they're not saying anything because nobody ever buys the records."

"Many times," DeGarmo adds, "non-writers think that the challenge is to be vague and esoteric. They think that's difficult. But from a writer's point of view, that's simple. The challenge is--"

"To be concise," says Key.

The ten songs on To Extremes exemplify concision. At an average length of just over three-and-a-half minutes, they flout the CD-era wisdom that says the more the better. Yet each song packs a wallop. "Hyper-faith" chugs along atop a modified "Paperback Writer" riff, "Dangerous Place" atop a modified "Peter Gunne" riff, and "People Got to Be Free" atop--what else?--a "People Got to Be Free" riff.

“It's weird how many people think that Eddie and I wrote 'People Got to Be Free,'" says Key of the 1968 Rascals classic. “It’s scary."

"I already got blasted for that [song] once," admits DeGarmo. "I was at the Southern Baptist Convention, and this guy came up to me and said, 'Man, I love your version of "People Got to Be Free."' But then he said, 'How do you deal with the theology of "I'll do unto you what you do unto me"?' I said, 'I don't know, man. We didn't write the song. We just like the way it sounds. Quit picking it apart.'"

DeGarmo's easy-going approach to secular music doesn't stop with the Rascals. Unlike Key, who's even written a book on the insidiously destructive values of secular rock, DeGarmo practically revels in the inclusiveness of his collection and the degree to which he hasn't interfered with what his own two kids listen to.

"I've got every kind of music in my house," admits DeGarmo, "from Aerosmith to Amy Grant."

"I wouldn't have Aerosmith in my house," says Key.

"Oh, I do. I've even got the Soup Dragons. I pride myself on staying up with what's going on. I own it all, and I've never stopped my children from listening to it. Instead, I've tried to teach them what it means. We've gone to all kinds of concerts together."

"They also watch Roseanne together," says Key.

"I think I'm a pretty conservative dad," DeGarmo continues. "I've just not made that big a deal out of it with my kids. I've tried to teach them what Scripture says about those things, and I've allowed them, within reason, to come up with their own notions of what those things mean. And it hasn't become an issue. I've made more of an issue out of their learning to be like Christ and how to walk with him and read Scripture. I've always pointed to the good rather than the bad, and it seems to have worked. Not that I don't censor them from some things. I do."

Like what?

"Uh, I don't let them watch porn."

"You're tough, man," jokes Key, who also keeps up with current music, but for different reasons.

"I have a radio program where I review secular music. So I have to go get the top ten every two or three weeks to see what people are listening to and review it. But I wouldn't have my kids listen to ninety percent of it."

Has he had any pleasant surprises?

"Oh yeah. There's some stuff out there that's probably fine. You take a Pearl Jam album, for instance, and eighty percent of the lyrics are fine. It's just that one oddball song, like 'Drop the Leash' or something like that, that ruins the record."

Such records might explain the presence on To Extremes of the anthemic "Rebel for God," which begins, "I bought a brand-new CD .... The band was preachin' anarchy," and features the refrain, "Throw away the lies you're believing / Throw yourself into the Savior."

"I don't know why groups find it necessary," says Key, "to put eight great tunes on an album--and then two that use the f-word thirty-seven times."

Despite the Southern Baptist who objected to "People Got to Be Free," D&K's association with that denomination has at least one positive aspect. Along with Newsboys, DC Talk, and other Christian musicians, the duo has signed on as spokesmen for the Southern Baptist-affiliated True Love Waits campaign, a program designed to help kids abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage.

At a recent TLW rally on the lawn of the National Mall facing the Capitol, D&K performed an hour's worth of new and old material in front of twenty thousand kids. More than an electric rehearsal for their upcoming Acoustic Cafe Tour, the set served to underscore D&K's commitment to teenagers.

"A lot of those kids look to us as heroes and role models," says DeGarmo. "This was a chance for us to look up to them. I respect those kids. They're going against popular culture to say they're not going to sleep with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Obviously, that's not what the movies or rock bands or rap bands teach."

"We said a few words of encouragement," says Key of the performance. "Basically, though, by the time we came on, it was to celebrate the fact that there were 211,000 pledge cards, on which kids had made a commitment to remain abstinent until marriage, staked to the ground."

The kids, in other words, were taking things "to extremes."

And after sixteen years as extremists themselves, DeGarmo and Key couldn't be happier.

* * * * *
Dana Key died on June 6, 2010.

Dino: Peace in the Midst of the Storm/All Creation Sings (1994)

(As published in Rejoice! ... )

Dino
Peace in the Midst of the Storm
All Creation Sings
(Benson)

Dino Kartsonakis's detractors regard him as a schockmeister with good reason: He is. His admirers regard him the same way; it's just that they think "schlockmeister"'s a compliment. Well, if ever the twain shall mmet, they'll do so on these two schockmeisterpieces. The gimmick on both is to blend Dino's soothingly tickled ivories with "nature sound effects"--babbling brooks, chirping birds, zygogenetic zephyrs, and other somniferous simulations. And it's a pretty good gimmick. For once Dino's background music has something in the foreground, and for once recorded nature noises aren't merely hypnotic. Granted, the "rain" sometimes sounds like a kitchen faucet left on, and the song selection--Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera Medley" excepted--is predictable. Granted also that people with a taste for this stuff will still prefer George Winston. But at least it's Winston and not Liberace that Dino's evoking these days.

L7: Hungry for Stink (1994)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

L7
Hungry for Stink
(Slash/Reprise)

Two of these songs--"Stuck Here Again" and "Fuel My Fire"--capture L7 at their hell-hath-no-fury best and manage to pay homage to X, Girlschool, and Janis Joplin simultaneously. The other highlight, "Riding with a Movie Star," is what the Ventures would sound like if they were women whose lives were living hells. Like the Breeders' "Cannonball" but with fewer words, "Movie Star" is punk-metal James Bond surf boogie for our unkinder, ungentler times. But most of the album is sloppy and rife with confessions like "I haven't changed my clothes in weeks / I'm wallowing in my own stink / My ass is sore from lyin' in bed / Am I alive or dead?" Good thing this album wasn't released in scratch-and-sniff.

Richard Marx: Rush Street (1992)/Paid Vacation (1994)

(From Rock & Roll Disc [unpublished 'cause the magazine folded) and the Illinois Entertainer respectively ... )

Richard Marx
Rush Street
Capitol CDP 7 95874 2
Total disc time: 65:35 (AAD)

Merit: **½
Sound: ****

Buried amid the pointless "hard rock" that dominates this overlong bestseller are three pretty solid pop songs and two chart-topping smashes--the slinky "Keep Coming Back" and the spooky "Hazard"--that deserve every bit of their market share. But for the most part Marx is trying too hard, cramming too many minutes into too many songs and singing them in a strained voice that owes more to Kenny Loggins than it does to any of the vintage rock-and-rollers whose records Marx told Jay Leno he collects.

Richard Marx
Paid Vacation
(Capitol)

Marx has so refined his mixture of rock, pop, and R&B that only Bryan Adams can boast more homogenized hooks-per-minute. And that's no put-down. Though none of this album's dozen rival Rush Street's "Hazard," only one of them--the fifty-four-second throwaway "Baby Blues"--doesn't draw a bullseye on a ready-made audience.

His guest list this time includes Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie, Fee Waybill, and, on the country-tinged "Nothing Left Behind Us," Vince Gill. True, they're subordinated to Marx's over-riding radio-friendly aesthetic, but they also inspire him to up his game with first-rate production and the least histrionic singing of his career.

Still, he does leave himself vulnerable to detractors convinced that he'll never outgrow his wimpiness: "There are too many nonsmokers dying each year as a result of second-hand smoke," he writes in the liner notes. "Demand a smoke-free environment." Next: Rock Against Cholesterol.