RICH
LIKE CHOCOLATE CAKE:
Jets
to Brazil
Four Cornered Night
Jade Tree (releases Aug. 15)
Murder
City Devils
In Name and Blood
Sub Pop
Sunny
Day Real Estate
The Rising Tide
Time Bomb
OTHER
DISCS FOR THOSE WHO LIKE RECORDS PLUMP AS FATTED CALVES:
Common
Like Water for Chocolate
MCA
Rugged hip-hop sweetened with smouldering jazz.
D'Angelo
Voodoo
EMD/Virgin
It is to sex as Fear of a Black Planet was to
politics.
In the Reaganautic '80s, a self-lashing commitment to minimalism
was practically an article of faith among underground rockers.
The fulsome Morning in America was in full swing, an era
recorded in popular memory as a Heineken-scented tea party
for corporate raiders. Musicians who wanted to set themselves
apart from the red-white-and-blue excess--and earn aesthetic-edge
points--took pride in stripping their sound down its most
brutal rudiments. So you had hardcore's tribal pummeling,
rap's spare concrete poetry, the jagged apocalypse-mongering
of industrial. Wiry music frayed nerves, excited fantasies
of rebellion and stabbed against the cloying pop and CheezWhiz
metal that ruled the day.
These days, we're in the thick of a patch of economic velvet
that would pop the mind of an '80s pirate capitalist. Now,
though, rather than raging against the Man with ragged salvos
of guitar and drums, some of the most popular left-of-center
artists happily dress their four-minute masterpieces in
rich string arrangements, fat keyboards and washing pomp-and-circumstance
production seldom heard since the '70s. Minimalism is dead;
the livin' is easy, the cotton is high.
This New Decadence hasn't exactly come out of nowhere.
Cocktail-mad swing and horn-happy ska have had their day
in recent years. But in the last few weeks and months, a
clutch of high-profile releases have highlighted the delight
some onetime slingers of raw volume now take in swelling
cellos, dainty piano turns and prog-rockin' stereo pans.
When he sang with Jawbreaker, Blake Schwarzenbach
always sounded like the victim of a perpetual sore throat
on top of an eternal broken heart. After the major-label-aided
demise of that most romantic of early '90s punk bands, Schwarzenbach
regrouped with Jets to Brazil. Orange Rhyming
Dictionary, JTB's '98 debut, mostly stuck with Jawbreaker's
formula: gritty, loud guitar, careening song structure and
Schwarzenbach's literate rasp.
Jets to Brazil's forthcoming new album, Four-Cornered
Night, however, bursts out of the indie rock closet
to display Schwarzenbach's hard-won pop spurs and chaps
with pride. There are only a few of the squalls of guitar
noise that blew through Jawbreaker and Orange Rhyming
Dictionary. What the album does offer, however, is a
barrage of up-tempo beats filled out with chiming bells
and bright guitar crackles that will send you hunting for
your needle-scarred copy of Revolver.
While our boy Blake occasionally seems too awfully proud
of himself for his willingness (and ability) to sound a
hell of a lot like the Beatles, Four-Cornered
Night is by and large a lovely album. Of course, Schwarzenbach
always was a softy--but what are we to make of supposed
tough guys like the Murder City Devils delving into
the plush side?
Yes, Seattle's self-styled juvi-delinquent champs sound
downright mature on their latest, the reeling In Name
and Blood. With the addition of keyboardist Leslie
Hardy, the Devils' traditional barrelhouse punk now
spends the album's length teetering over a chasm of blue-black
organ.
It's as though the band's sound has doubled rather than
simply been augmented by one new member. Some fans of the
Devils' early rough-riding might object to their new depth
and range, just as the new rock-opera antics of fellow Seattleite
pretty boys the Makers upset garage purists. For
my money, though, the addition of Hardy saves a schtick
that was fast going stale.
This infectious love for the lush, however, can work like
too much sugar on the metabolism of a 4-year-old. Disaster,
in other words. Witness The Rising Tide, the new
album from mid-'90s scene darlings Sunny Day Real Estate.
As noted in these pages last week, this record blows the
melodrama of the band's old work into rococo studio constructions.
Chamber quartets vie with soprano singer Jeremy Enigk
for the title of Most Precious. Syrupy and strongly
reminiscent of the days when your older brother and his
friends got stoned and talked about how shit-hot Geddy
Lee was, it's a misbegotten thing.
Surely, though, there's more to follow. Unless the artistic
tide unexpectedly turns in favor of the spare and skeletal,
more musicians spoon-fed on abrasive rock will probably
test out jam sessions from the kids in their local youth
symphony. Will the New Decadence mean brave explorations
à la the Murder City Devils and Jets to Brazil?
Or will it be the rebirth of a hideous prog-rock heritage,
like sin come home to roost?
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