Dread the Night

Listening to Gallow's Grey Britain while writing on my laptop, sitting in a coffee shop is like listening to the Rolling Stones in an office cubicle or like listening to Wagner at the beach or like listening to JET without slamming my head in a car door. It just feels wrong. Honestly, I think any listening experience short of bleeding from the nose in the center of a sweaty mosh pit in a London Rock club is probably not in keeping with the spirit of this music.

While the familial relation to British Punk pioneers The Clash and The Sex Pistols is definitely perceptible, Gallows' approach is from the more Metal end of the spectrum and while they may not be objectively more angry than their ancestors, the members of Gallows collectively embrace their fury and let it shine through in every aspect of the music from the aggressive, dissonant guitar work to lead singer's vocals. Lacking any vestige of the archetypal whiny Punk sneer, vocalist Frank Carter belts his songs through undoubtedly raw vocal chords with a masculine, guttural force more reminiscent of Metal, but his aggro style and cockney accent are still unmistakably true to the genre. The same can be said of the lyrics which, while being a touch darker than your typical Punk fare, have that familiar grounded disillusionment of the resentful lower class London Rocker.

The imagery conjured up on Grey Britain is super violent but the musical context of the individual tracks is important in how they each come across. The more traditional Punk sound of “London is the Reason” lends it a relatively light-hearted tone which, in combination with the rally cry “We are the rats and we run this town,” sounds like a veritable party anthem for anyone with some surplus anger and a bunch of anti-social mates in tow. “I Dread the Night” is another tune which is improbably fun, due in part to the fact that it's sung from the ironic perspective of someone who went out looking for a fight, and lost. In addition, the rousing Punk chorus and driving guitars infuse the listener with adrenaline and though I'm a lover not a fighter, I'll admit that the song does make me imagine what it would feel like to fracture my knuckles on another man's head.

At the CD's halfway point we get an uncharacteristically slow and somber departure from an album that is otherwise a consistently fast and brutal affair. “The Vulture (act I)” gives Frank Carter a chance to reveal his tender side, singing softly and sweetly over an acoustic guitar and a string ensemble arrangement that borders on cheesiness. It's a clever move on the band's part; they play it so that right about when you might ask yourself if Gallows has gone soft, they rip into the second act of “The Vulture” and thoroughly disintegrate any misguided sense of serenity you may have been harboring. We are led across this Rubicon to a notably darker, more aggressive B side where any Punk playfulness has been cast aside in favor of a merciless attack on The United Kingdom and its status quo. An air raid siren wails away ominously in the background as if to say “You ain't seen nothing yet.”

On songs like “The Great Forgiver” and “Graves” Gallows kicks into another gear riding a pulse of thrashing dissonance while hammering home their anti-social, anarchistic themes. The downer of the album may be “Misery,” whose beautiful but foreboding intro leads into a perverse love note to suffering itself.

“Misery fucking loves me, but I love her more

she is the last light, the dark nights

the noose round my neck and the hole in the floor

there is nothing left for me, I want to kill myself just for relief

the black cloud, the death shroud

the weight of the world dragging me down.”

Delivered at full force, “Misery” is hard and ugly but as over the top as it is, its sincerity remains intact and this is the true success of Grey Britain. With such aggressively angry music, if its underlying sentiments were to be perceived as contrived or manufactured it would trigger any listener's internal BS detector and it wouldn't work on any level. To my ears, Gallows achieves an air of authenticity and that makes their interesting mix of Hardcore Punk and Metal all the more enjoyable.

The band leaves us with dark parting words screamed over a military drum beat; a bleak vision for the future of the U.K. The sound of Carter fighting for breath as the music fades away conveys his anger and intensity as well as anything else on the album.

Further Evolution of the Jazz Underground -or- Jazz Isn't Dead, It Just Smells Funny

In the tiny corner of the internet known as “The Free Bin” rule numero uno so far has been to write only about obscure music that I wouldn't have otherwise heard of had I not found it in The Free Bin, i.e. obscure stuff sent in by starving, independent artists who have been largely ignored by virtually all press and mainstream audiences. However, since I made the rule I can certainly bend it a little and review my new favorite disc, Tiny Resistors by the still independent, but decreasingly obscure, Brooklyn-based bassist/composer Todd Sickafoose. I promise I will resist blogging about the new Lil' Bow Wow album I found in the pile.

The reason I have braved this slippery slope is that Tiny Resistors is A) too good not to share with you and B) is perfect supporting evidence to contradict one of my least favorite popular misconceptions, to wit: “Jazz is Dead.” The truth of course is that Jazz is thriving and genius pervades the scene just as much as it ever has. Whether anyone currently appreciates this point is perhaps a separate topic entirely but Jazz's reputation as a dead music or even an ambiguous, undead entity doomed to wander the spooky outskirts of artistic relevance is inextricably linked to its dwindling audience. How did it come to this?

Somewhere along the way, whether it was the absence of good taste during the 70's fusion movement, or the staunch traditionalism of some of the more visible artists of the 90's and 00's, Jazz went from being a form of popular music to a sub genre of classical music or an intellectual novelty that smacks of self indulgence. A certain book of rules pertaining to style or instrumentation had come to define an art form that had previously been defined by spontaneity and constant re-invention from within as well as from without. An over-reliance and dogmatic reverence to tradition has produced a Jazz scene the mainstream of which predominantly consists of an aging set of fans go to see an aging set of artists rehashing the same music that originally made them popular three or four decades ago. [ranting]

With the release of Tiny Resistors Sickafoose and his contemporaries have authoritatively marked their place as integral players in a movement that may very well reverse these current stigmas and bring innovative, creative music back to the spotlight. Worn out idioms are pushed aside as the band explores fresh textures and timbres. The obligatory Jazz solo is eschewed in favor of a more collective improvisatory approach which brings the listener rewarding and unexpected developments all within a tightly through-composed structure.

The overarching backbone to this structure is clearly groove. No matter how off kilter the pulse or how subtle the rhythmic interplay, dance-ability trumps complication. Tunes like “Invisible Ink” or “Warm Stone” groove hard, pulling at your bones with an irresistible kinetic energy. The warm, organic tone from Sickafoose's upright bass lends a grounded, folksy feel to “Everyone is Going” the 11/8 time signature of which is usually reserved for nerdy Prog Rock fare. Even the head bobbing opening track, “Future Flora,” seems simple enough until you realize that your head is only bobbing to the down beat every other meter, on account of the 10/8.

And as the booty shakes, the mind reels at the matrix of poly-rhythms Sickafoose and his cohorts weave over the foundational grooves. Beautiful in its breadth of imagination and intriguing in its dense complexity, the interplay between the instruments exists far outside the constraints of genre as a limitless exploration rather than a new mix of old sounds. In the epic adventure that is “Bye Bye Bees” Afro-Cuban beats and Flamenco hand claps bounce over rock drums while insistent horns and guitar cut through voices, whistles and touches of electronica floating in the ether. Rather than merely adding a separate flavor to the proceedings, each of these parts' harmonic and rhythmic space relates uniquely with the others, fitting together in a 3-D sonic jigsaw puzzle of textural potential.

One of this music's greatest strengths is that while it innovates, it also exhibits an undeniable reverence for the musical history on which it builds. The horn arrangements of “Pianos of the 9^th Ward,” an elegy for a post-Katrina New Orleans, are a lovingly crafted tribute to the days of the Big Band and if you isolated the horn tracks you easily might think you were listening to a recording from a different era. The beauty of Tiny Resistors is that it shows that influences can be referenced and nods can be given in appropriate directions but within a progressive context the sound remains fresh, just like Jazz was intended to be.

Nintendo 20-Something Riot

In an increasingly litigious society such as ours, Math the Band would be wise to include some sort of legal disclaimer with their recent release Don't Worry. Not like the ones you see warning you that you may contract lupus or suffer “itchy retina” should you be daring enough to take Lipitor, but something more akin to the phrase “Please Enjoy 'Miller High Life' Responsibly.”

I say this because each of the CD's nine tracks of casio-keyboard-heavy, post punk, dance pop come at you hard and fast and you will get you psyched. Very very psyched. Naturally, after a few of those “Miller High Lives,” mere slam dancing and punching air begin to lose their luster. You may ask yourself “How can I further disregard my personal safety and have a REAL party?” At this point I downright challenge you to resist playing air guitar on the roof of your buddy's van doing 20mph in a mall parking lot while you're listening to the chorus of Don't Worry's opening track “Hang Out/ Hang Ten.”

The music of Don't Worry is... how to put this... sonically inelegant. It's reminiscent of a soundtrack to an 8-bit video game but truthfully, the end result seems perfectly tailored to those of us who can actually sing said soundtracks on cue. Keyboard lines played at a breakneck pace conjure up campy images of a time traveling Ludvig Von Beethoven clad head to toe in neon green and pink and jamming out on a red “keytar.” Raw exuberance is personified in the fuzzy guitar, purposefully cheesy synths and programmed drum tracks all of which provide a lo-fi launchpad for the simultaneously wonderful and ridiculous vocal stylings of Math the Band's two members Kevin Steinhauser and Justine Mainville who literally scream their devil-may-care anthems such as the afore-mentioned “Hang Out/Hang Ten” at the top of their lungs:

“EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

EVERYBODY HAVE FUN TONIGHT

etc..” [Trust me, it makes sense with the music.]

So no, it's not exactly Bob Dylan but at the same time, these songs aren't simply party-hard mantras and ironic non-sequiturs but are often sincere expressions of angst and reckless abandon. Balancing out Sk8er anthems like “It's Gonna Be Awesome” are tunes like “Why Didn't You Get a Haircut” and “Introducing the Magic Eye” which are sung from the perspective of the young artist struggling to find his or her place in an adult world. Fortunately Math the Band seems to take any serious issues in good stride giving us the impression that even if they are unemployed and living in a basement, they are going to make the best of it. At the closing of the recording, the duo hits us with the borrowed chorus, “It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine” and I think they mean it.

So, go ahead and listen to “Tour de Friends” at full volume but before you jump your skateboard off a roof and onto an inflatable alligator floating in an above-ground swimming pool, remember: You've been warned and Math the Band does not condone your wicked stunt and therefore is not legally responsible for the injuries you're almost positively going to sustain. On a happier note: the rest of the album will make fantastic driving music for your buddies as they shuttle your busted face to the nearest emergency room.