Q&A
SONIC REDUCER
These Are Album Reviews
Your Flesh: Hangs Pretty! The Black Halos: Whoa, Canada! The Pixies: Hands Off! Mehldau: Insouciance!

BY ABRAM GOLDMAN-ARMSTRONG, SEYTA SELTER, BILL SMITH AND SAM DODGE SOULE
243-2122

Various Artists: Hangin' from the Devil's Tree (Your Flesh)

I have faith in Your Flesh. This Minneapolis fanzine--built on smug cynicism, arch brainpower and impossibly referential crypto-zinespeak--has handed down reliable opinion on underground music and associated arts for 19 years. Given YF's consistent soft spot for inspired subversion, at first glance one might think editor Peter Davis could have dug deeper for more obscure, "out there" artists for the mag's first compilation CD.

In fact, Hangin' from the Devil's Tree is a crack collection of music by performers who have long been lauded in Your Flesh reviews. Saleable names like Thurston Moore, Supersuckers, Lazy Cowgirls, New Bomb Turks and the BellRays check in with contributions that either show them in a unique light or catch them at the peak of their powers.

Davis also turns out to be a real hand at convincing sequencing as well, a rarity on most comps. Goatsnake's satanic whump bleeds into Slaves' angular swell, in turn giving way to the laid-back post-Urge Overkill guitar rock of Ed Roeser's Electric Airlines.

Then there's the sparkling collegiate bar pop of Eyesinweasel passing into the undulating wankery of Bardo Pond, which slowly melts into the off-center spoken word of Michael Gerald. Not to mention the Vandermark Five, skidding about on free jazz's event horizon, showering down upon some vintage Monster Magnet drug roar, quickly sobered up by Cobra Verde's uptempo anthem to nihilism on the title track.

It's a varied mix and it works. That faith of mine remains unbroken. (SDS)

The Black Halos: The Violent Years (Sub Pop)

Vancouver, British Columbia's Black Halos play a punked-up brand of good ol' rock and roll that has somehow survived the great punk die-off caused, in recent years, by MTV and its legion of Pennywise clones.

Originally known as the Black Market Babies (a name it turned out they shared with a long-ago DC band), the Halos live in a glamorous limbo somewhere between Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. The MC5, of course, sneak in there as well. Heavy on the eyeliner and leather pants, they look more NYC than VBC, but while this particular style has spawned countless poseurs, the Halos back it up.

Raging straight-ahead rawkers--"Some Things Never Fall," the heavy "Warsaw"--are what they do best. "Lost in the '90s" seems like an odd song title for these glam-punks, until you listen to the lyrics, which lament the fate of deleted '50s rock-and-roll records lying rejected in the back of a dark record store. The Black Halos unabashedly employ a "big rock record" sound and those lovable New Wave hand claps, reminding us that the "underground ain't underground no more." True enough. (AG-A)

Various Artists: Tribute to the Pixies (Invisible)

As with countless other tribute albums, the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes to mind here. The only interesting thing about this tribute is that these unbroken songs are needlessly unfixed by crazy Japanese bands.

Don't get too excited, Nipponophiles--they pretty much suck. While I claim no fluency in Japanese, I'm pretty sure tribute does not translate into insult.

Flopping from thrashy, cymbal-heavy pop-punk travesties to wishy-washy industrial attempts to speed-metal train wrecks, Tribute to the Pixies thoroughly molests Doolittle and Trompe Le Monde. The Penpals' version of "Here Comes Your Man" conjures metallic frenzies like a nightmare, containing no inkling of the original, while Naht's "Wave of Mutilation" is just plain weird; this massacre leaps from pop-punk into a sensitive string-filled lullaby (Conceptual? The first half being the mutilation, the second being the wave? Uh, yeah.). This would be a mediocre album in any light; the fact that it assaults some of the best rock-and-roll songwriting around only makes it worse. (SS)

Brad Mehldau Trio: Places (Warner)

Mehldau has been heralded as jazz's Renaissance Boy Wonder, the classic post-modern pianist for a cynical age--rough and ready, with a combative insouciance. He pens his own liner notes in erudite, name-dropping prose (this time we get Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche, Goethe, Emerson and, oh yeah, Ellington), refuses to be a mere standard-bearing relic, and is as much punk attitude as Bill Evans introspection.

Most important, over the past five years, he's backed up his brashness by creating a first-class trio with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy. After a series of mature standard recordings, this all-Mehldau program exhibits his informed disregard for the artificial boundaries built to keep pop, jazz and classical music forms from bleeding together.

"It seems like the grandeur of a place only reveals itself after I've left it," Mehldau the Romantic says in his notes, and it's refreshing to hear him so unapologetically nostalgic. Places is really a series of improvised miniatures about jazz road life. "Los Angeles" (something of a theme, popping up three times) is a simple melody pecked with an aching emotional purity. "29 Palms" evokes the gospel vamps of Keith Jarrett's richest work. "Madrid" offers a buoyant inversion of "Someday My Prince Will Come." "West Hartford" turns a Prokofiev riff on its head and makes you almost want to visit that god-forsaken 'burb.

Throughout, Mehldau's playing is a stealthy battle between the self-indulgent intellectual and the torpid romantic. Grenadier and Rossy offer elastic shading and accompaniment and their side work has only added to the trio's chemistry. Though still a work in progress, you can hear the seeds of the great musical alchemy of the Evans, Jarrett and Allen-Haden-Motian trios. That's saying a lot. (BS)