The Art of Noise
Reviewed:
I Dated the Devil by Antonius Block (Trost Records 2006)
Plays Polmo Polpo by Sandro Perri (Constellation Records 2006)
When guitarist and drummer Jorge Docouto handed me the debut album of his Brooklyn-based art-noise rock band Antonius Block, he told me he hated anecdotes and adjectives, especially in self-indulgent music reviews. I Dated the Devil—precise, direct—reflects this aesthetic: it cuts to the bone, the initial title track shrieking open with a riff as simple and urgent as a siren over the hammered throb of Andrya Ambro’s drumming. Austrian-born singer Tina Schula, whose detached, sometimes spoken, vocalizing invites comparison with Nico, complements the austerity of the instrumentation with a disturbingly blunt matter-of-factness on this and other tracks. Elsewhere emotionally inscrutable, here her voice projects at once disconnection, resilience, damage, and power as she sings alternately of dating the devil and breaking off his horns. Through restraint, simplicity, and minimalism, the band members leave a kind of space open between them that echoes the hollowing disillusion expressed in many of the lyrics—the disillusion, for instance, of beating off a devilish lover only to be left self-mockingly “Crying like a baby / For Jesus to save me / Waiting to be reborn.”
In the context of such severity, even subtle changes are dramatic, and songs that begin as skeletons of voice and drums can bloom quickly into moments of voluminous guitar rock, as does “Thanks.” After Schula sardonically thanks a deadbeat lover for all his lying, drinking, and manipulating over a frantic four-note riff and a one-two drumbeat for over a minute, the guitar abruptly swells open into full, grand, arena-sized chords. The lyrics seem to undercut the triumph of the guitar, however, as Schula sings, “I need you / I need you // But I don’t want you. / I don’t want you.” Disgusted by her lover’s lying and empty promises more than anything else (“Thanks for telling me” is the frequent refrain), the singer here ends without any kind of false or merely wishful verbal answer to the emotional quagmire of dependency. The guitar continues alone, leveling out and extending the track into a drone-dirge that conveys a sense of a new direction, though a flat and solemn one. Where words fail, the repetition of this simple, dissonant riff moves forward, demanding a second look at the concluding lines: perhaps wants can in fact trump needs, or, if not, at least there may be some kind of dignity in confronting the intractability of one’s fate. The resolution of the song—a hardened answer to bleak questions—depends entirely on the persuasive, stripped Stoicism emoted by the guitar’s metallic atonality.
Much of the album depends on electric guitar tone and texture, Docouto conjuring bleeps, steel drum sounds, mechanical grating, clicks, growls, alarm bells, and a lot of indescribable strangeness from his amp. While nearly always present and wildly innovative, distortion is nevertheless disciplined, as on “13 New Moons,” where furiously plucked notes spin into brief roars made edgier and more visceral by Docouto’s rigorous control. For all its unconventionality and experimentation, the band “rocks” like very few others, eschewing the alienating pretension possible with some avant-garde noise rock, but remaining firmly on the bracing, breaking border of what mainstream American sensibilities would define as music. It possesses the best qualities of the best of New York’s rock avant-garde old and new: the Velvet Underground, early Sonic Youth, Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But while the band-equation game may provide an accurate enough sketch of Antonius Block’s sound, it would be a disservice to suggest these bands as influences. Rather, Antonius Block taps into a New York tradition, its primal dissonance evoking the uncompromising concrete and steel walling the bohemian edges of city life. Better to describe the band as original and organic than experimental or unconventional considering the willful artificial novelty those latter terms sometimes imply. Even—or especially—at its most abrasive moments, Antonius Block achieves a directness, honesty, and emotiveness seldom if ever heard on the radio or television.
Like I Dated the Devil, Toronto-based Sandro Perri’s recent Plays Polmo Polpo (largely a reinterpretation of several tracks previously released under the name Polmo Polpo) incorporates sounds that many would define as noise if heard in isolation into richly layered musical soundscapes. Though an EP, Plays Polmo Polpo develops with the logic and unity of an album (a full-length is due this spring), beginning with “Romeo Heart (slight return),” a free-floating overture of descending harmonica, rumbling drums and clicks, electronic beeps, whirs, and drones, somber bass clarinet, and sporadically strummed and plucked guitar. Perri’s training in jazz and previous work in electronica combine here to create a warm, loosely structured, but cohesively moving, aquatic atmosphere, the unpredictability and variety of its sonic elements like a profusion of life drifting along with a slow deep current (a motif present in much of his work as Polmo Polpo, which roughly translated from Italian means octopus lung).
Track two, “Requiem for a Fox,” incorporates much of the layered diffusion of “Romeo,” but quickens into a regular tempo that carries the voice of Perri, who sings on the rest of the album. The final three tracks tighten and clarify the established musical themes by dropping the electronics and foregrounding Perri’s singing and acoustic guitar with minimal drum and horn accompaniment. As dreamy, entrancing, and relaxed as the first tracks are, Perri’s transition to the intimacy of singer/songwriter provides an unexpected and powerful comfort after their continually shifting, layered expansiveness. This movement from the liberating otherworldly atmosphere of “Romeo” and “Requiem” to the familiar homeliness of acoustic, verse-chorus-verse pieces defines the EP, which ends with “Circles,” on which Perri sings, “I run around in circles and I / Find the circles that transfer me to calm, / The circle’s getting smaller cause I / Made the point of tracing circles back home.” The lines, like the music, combine the thematic openness of formalism with a human tone and warmth. Similarly, the structured and seemingly less structured halves of Plays Polomo Polpo mutually complement one another: even as Perri frees his music from the constraints of typical pop forms to explore otherworldly soundscapes, he also reinvigorates those forms by reminding the listener why they ever developed in the first place: to provide us with a welcome, or at least inevitable, home.
But even the EP’s openers—at times less songs than sonic textures—establish a powerful sense of familiarity. Perri finds the warm tones and percussiveness of everyday sounds like closing doors, creaking, clacking, and clocks ticking, inserting them seamlessly—or mimicking them—alongside more conventionally played guitar and drums. Both I Dated the Devil and Plays Polmo Polpo succeed through expert musicianship. But it is a musicianship that relies on sensibility and the ability to find and select new tones beyond the conventional pallet as much as it does on skill or creativity, suggesting the uncanny conclusion that music is potentially everywhere if you stop to listen—in the roar of trucks and machines, in the accidents of amplifiers, the possibilities of electricity, in the noises a house makes as it settles.
I Dated the Devil by Antonius Block (Trost Records 2006)
Plays Polmo Polpo by Sandro Perri (Constellation Records 2006)
When guitarist and drummer Jorge Docouto handed me the debut album of his Brooklyn-based art-noise rock band Antonius Block, he told me he hated anecdotes and adjectives, especially in self-indulgent music reviews. I Dated the Devil—precise, direct—reflects this aesthetic: it cuts to the bone, the initial title track shrieking open with a riff as simple and urgent as a siren over the hammered throb of Andrya Ambro’s drumming. Austrian-born singer Tina Schula, whose detached, sometimes spoken, vocalizing invites comparison with Nico, complements the austerity of the instrumentation with a disturbingly blunt matter-of-factness on this and other tracks. Elsewhere emotionally inscrutable, here her voice projects at once disconnection, resilience, damage, and power as she sings alternately of dating the devil and breaking off his horns. Through restraint, simplicity, and minimalism, the band members leave a kind of space open between them that echoes the hollowing disillusion expressed in many of the lyrics—the disillusion, for instance, of beating off a devilish lover only to be left self-mockingly “Crying like a baby / For Jesus to save me / Waiting to be reborn.”
In the context of such severity, even subtle changes are dramatic, and songs that begin as skeletons of voice and drums can bloom quickly into moments of voluminous guitar rock, as does “Thanks.” After Schula sardonically thanks a deadbeat lover for all his lying, drinking, and manipulating over a frantic four-note riff and a one-two drumbeat for over a minute, the guitar abruptly swells open into full, grand, arena-sized chords. The lyrics seem to undercut the triumph of the guitar, however, as Schula sings, “I need you / I need you // But I don’t want you. / I don’t want you.” Disgusted by her lover’s lying and empty promises more than anything else (“Thanks for telling me” is the frequent refrain), the singer here ends without any kind of false or merely wishful verbal answer to the emotional quagmire of dependency. The guitar continues alone, leveling out and extending the track into a drone-dirge that conveys a sense of a new direction, though a flat and solemn one. Where words fail, the repetition of this simple, dissonant riff moves forward, demanding a second look at the concluding lines: perhaps wants can in fact trump needs, or, if not, at least there may be some kind of dignity in confronting the intractability of one’s fate. The resolution of the song—a hardened answer to bleak questions—depends entirely on the persuasive, stripped Stoicism emoted by the guitar’s metallic atonality.
Much of the album depends on electric guitar tone and texture, Docouto conjuring bleeps, steel drum sounds, mechanical grating, clicks, growls, alarm bells, and a lot of indescribable strangeness from his amp. While nearly always present and wildly innovative, distortion is nevertheless disciplined, as on “13 New Moons,” where furiously plucked notes spin into brief roars made edgier and more visceral by Docouto’s rigorous control. For all its unconventionality and experimentation, the band “rocks” like very few others, eschewing the alienating pretension possible with some avant-garde noise rock, but remaining firmly on the bracing, breaking border of what mainstream American sensibilities would define as music. It possesses the best qualities of the best of New York’s rock avant-garde old and new: the Velvet Underground, early Sonic Youth, Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But while the band-equation game may provide an accurate enough sketch of Antonius Block’s sound, it would be a disservice to suggest these bands as influences. Rather, Antonius Block taps into a New York tradition, its primal dissonance evoking the uncompromising concrete and steel walling the bohemian edges of city life. Better to describe the band as original and organic than experimental or unconventional considering the willful artificial novelty those latter terms sometimes imply. Even—or especially—at its most abrasive moments, Antonius Block achieves a directness, honesty, and emotiveness seldom if ever heard on the radio or television.
Like I Dated the Devil, Toronto-based Sandro Perri’s recent Plays Polmo Polpo (largely a reinterpretation of several tracks previously released under the name Polmo Polpo) incorporates sounds that many would define as noise if heard in isolation into richly layered musical soundscapes. Though an EP, Plays Polmo Polpo develops with the logic and unity of an album (a full-length is due this spring), beginning with “Romeo Heart (slight return),” a free-floating overture of descending harmonica, rumbling drums and clicks, electronic beeps, whirs, and drones, somber bass clarinet, and sporadically strummed and plucked guitar. Perri’s training in jazz and previous work in electronica combine here to create a warm, loosely structured, but cohesively moving, aquatic atmosphere, the unpredictability and variety of its sonic elements like a profusion of life drifting along with a slow deep current (a motif present in much of his work as Polmo Polpo, which roughly translated from Italian means octopus lung).
Track two, “Requiem for a Fox,” incorporates much of the layered diffusion of “Romeo,” but quickens into a regular tempo that carries the voice of Perri, who sings on the rest of the album. The final three tracks tighten and clarify the established musical themes by dropping the electronics and foregrounding Perri’s singing and acoustic guitar with minimal drum and horn accompaniment. As dreamy, entrancing, and relaxed as the first tracks are, Perri’s transition to the intimacy of singer/songwriter provides an unexpected and powerful comfort after their continually shifting, layered expansiveness. This movement from the liberating otherworldly atmosphere of “Romeo” and “Requiem” to the familiar homeliness of acoustic, verse-chorus-verse pieces defines the EP, which ends with “Circles,” on which Perri sings, “I run around in circles and I / Find the circles that transfer me to calm, / The circle’s getting smaller cause I / Made the point of tracing circles back home.” The lines, like the music, combine the thematic openness of formalism with a human tone and warmth. Similarly, the structured and seemingly less structured halves of Plays Polomo Polpo mutually complement one another: even as Perri frees his music from the constraints of typical pop forms to explore otherworldly soundscapes, he also reinvigorates those forms by reminding the listener why they ever developed in the first place: to provide us with a welcome, or at least inevitable, home.
But even the EP’s openers—at times less songs than sonic textures—establish a powerful sense of familiarity. Perri finds the warm tones and percussiveness of everyday sounds like closing doors, creaking, clacking, and clocks ticking, inserting them seamlessly—or mimicking them—alongside more conventionally played guitar and drums. Both I Dated the Devil and Plays Polmo Polpo succeed through expert musicianship. But it is a musicianship that relies on sensibility and the ability to find and select new tones beyond the conventional pallet as much as it does on skill or creativity, suggesting the uncanny conclusion that music is potentially everywhere if you stop to listen—in the roar of trucks and machines, in the accidents of amplifiers, the possibilities of electricity, in the noises a house makes as it settles.
posted by R at 4:14 PM
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