PJ Harvey – Rid of Me | Review

Rid of Me

PJ HarveyRid of Me Island CID 8002 / 514 696-2 (1993)


The “grunge” rock movement was all about raw, loud, provocative sounds.  When PJ Harvey released Rid of Me, as the style peaked in popularity, she recognized that dramatic effects could draw out the force of loud, distorted power chords by contrasting them against other things.  This was her most aggressive sounding album.  Yet the opener, the title track, begins with whispered vocals, muted guitar chords, and barely audible percussion before unleashing her distorted guitar and cry of “Don’t you don’t you wish you never never met her?,” first in a short burst, then completely unrestrained, like great beasts that struggle against their bridles and finally let themselves loose.

“50 Ft. Queenie” and “Me-Jane” are just knockout punches.  These were different sorts of empowerment anthems.  “50 Ft. Queenie” positions the protagonist as “king of the world” and rather than being some kind of dream, this is the sort of song that is going to make her (yes, her) the androgynous king of the world through raw power.  This song roars.  At the same time it mocks the male libidinal quest for dominance, while also entertaining the idea of a countercultural revolution to seize control in the name of a new order.  It undermines the patriarchal claims to power by making the crude assertions of male sexuality like “I’m 20 inches long” in a way — shouted out by a woman — that robs them of their authenticity.  “Me-Jane” is another one of those songs that Harvey does so well.  It takes the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and Jane Porter characters, and converts Jane from a “damsel in distress” to the wise and thinking one suffering through Tarzan’s interminable chest-pounding and pointless screaming.  PJ sings almost like she’s screaming too.  But it’s the aural equivalent of rolling her eyes in contempt.

Provocative producer/recording engineer Steve Albini is on board.  He gives this album a charismatic sound.  Some love it; others hate it.  The drums are indistinct, but loud, very loud.  They present a low, pummeling rumble, like a photograph carefully kept just barely out of focus even in the central field of view.  They sound like someone pounding away on something, the most literalist approach to what the drums are all about!  The guitar, and PJ’s vocals are also given the same treatment.  The bass is similarly indistinct, but without any of the loudness — what is normally the source of driving power in a lot of punk rock is here inverted, or, subverted, just like the gender roles addressed by the lyrics of numerous songs.  “Rub ‘Til It Bleeds,” one of the heaviest songs on the first half of the album, exemplifies how the bass mostly provides noisy texture, rather than a rhythmic heartbeat.  All together, this approach puts a number of the band’s individual elements or sounds on a more equal footing than is usually permitted.  There is little room for any individual to assume the spotlight.  Not even PJ’s vocals or guitar get special, preferential treatment.  This is the hard rock equivalent of the sort of anarchistic “harmolodics” found on Ornette Coleman’s 1970s and 80s albums like Science Fiction and Of Human Feelings.  For those who hated Albini’s production, demos of many of the songs were later released (4-Track Demos).

While PJ may have instinctively used a more bluesy foundation than what lay in Albini’s radical punk inclinations, the end results on Rid of Me perfectly encapsulate a sense of confrontation.  It seems to perfectly fit the songwriting.  None of the instruments get to assume their socially predestined roles.  What helps separate this album from the ignorant clamor of something that just goes out as fast and loud as possible right from the start is not just that the clamor is juxtaposed with moments that regroup and coil up to await a springing attack, which it does magnificently, but also that the clamor and attack is a mass of seeming contradictions in and of itself.  The drums, the guitar, the vocals have incongruous sonorities.  And yet, they still come together to make a powerful statement inseparably bound up in a singular if slightly murky sonic fabric.  This is close to the best of what “grunge” rock had to offer.  It was a burst of something that cut against the grain.  It was arresting.  But it did that with an awareness of the past, and sense of its place in a line of failed attempts and counterrevolutions.  This is why a cover of Dylan‘s “Highway 61 Revisited” makes sense here, as a link to the countercultural tradition of the 1960s, even if the performance doesn’t live up to the standards of the rest of the album.

Rid of Me had a leg up on much of the other “grunge” rock because its sense of purpose was fundamentally more dangerous.  It was a sledgehammer.  But it was a sledgehammer flying about in the midst of bystanders put suddenly on edge.  While hindsight has shown that “grunge”, and any other movements in the same direction, failed to reach a tipping point to sustain their objectives, as the support for touring and mass media airplay were withdrawn after a few years, even decades later this music sounds as fresh and empowering as the day it was released.

Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | Review

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk HotelIn the Aeroplane Over the Sea Merge MRG136CD (1998)


In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the defining albums of “indie rock” in the late 1990s.  It came along after the “grunge” and “alternative rock” moments had passed, and major labels were sort of finished trying to foster anything deeper than manufactured dance pop.  The music relies upon eclecticism.  Although there is a recurrent use of acoustic guitar in a driving folk-rock kind of manner, most of the songs use instrumentation uncommon in “rock” music: accordion, bowed saw, a horn section.  The vocals also develop what was the most recognizable feature in the genre of indie “twee” pop, in the form of off-key, slightly nasal and almost whiny delivery.  When the horns play, they also adopt the mannerisms of the vocals.  They play asynchronously, adding some dissonance and beats to the harmonies.  Although these are carefully crafted affectations, they all add up to something childlike.  This was its defining characteristic.  Many of these song lyrics are about children or childhood.  Putting all this into some kind of context, it was a retreat from dominant culture, to a world of sheltered authenticity and innocence.  It made perfect sense viewed in hindsight.  In the United States, the “baby boom” generation was busy ensuring that the pains of dwindling economic prospects in a globalized world of “outsourcing” fell disproportionately on younger generations and that the benefits of economic bubbles flowed to them rather than to youth as well (the coming housing bubble is a classic example, pricing the young out of home ownership).  Why wouldn’t young adults look back fondly at childhood, when the promise of a standard of living equal to their parents’ generation seemed credible?  In a directly analogous way, in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] Freud wrote about how dreams of nakedness without shame staged the fulfillment of a wish to return to childhood innocence.  This is what warbled, untutored “twee” singing (without shame) is about.  So In the Aeroplane pines and yearns in its isolated, self-created world within a world, never really expressing something affirmative other than to distance itself and disavow the surrounding circumstances.  This is exactly what the opener, “King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1” is about (“When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers . . . And from above you how I sank into your soul / Into that secret place where no one dares to go”).  Without drums, the sense of isolation is accentuated.  And “Two-Headed Boy,” referring to a kind of freak in a glass jar, marvels at a wondrously monstrous reality separated from the regular world.  When the music seems so fragile that it might fall apart at any second, it rests on fear that just that sort of fracture might happen.  This is sort of a self-defeating approach, because it ends up being kind of complicit in the sorts of things it tries to stand morally apart from.  But, at the same time, it at least represented a recognition that the course was wrong. But that was, in a way, the only achievement.  There are still not many recorded “confessions of a beautiful soul” as evocative as this.

Cannonball Adderly – The Black Messiah

The Black Messiah

Cannonball AdderlyThe Black Messiah Capitol SWBO-846 (1972)


Live jazz fusion album from mainstay of the hard bop era, Cannonball Adderly.  It is refreshing to hear him moving into new areas and adopting a variety of rock influences.  He is joined by a lot of Miles Davis alumni, and no doubt this style of fusion strongly resembles what Davis’ groups were doing up through this period — particularly Nat Adderly‘s playing on cornet (esp. “The Chocolate Nuisance”).  Lee Morgan‘s last recordings would also make a good reference point.  It’s an easygoing record.  If it ends up being a restatement of what others had already mapped out in the fusion era, it remains an excellent summary.  It is just plain likeable. George Duke on keyboards in particular sounds great, even if again he sounds like any number of keyboardists from Davis’ groups.  The main drawback is the prominence of long narrations by Cannonball, which are eloquent but dry, and stretch this to double-album length.  Unlike, say, Rashaan Roland Kirk‘s Bright Moments, there is little showmanship and theatricality in the narrations, making them less of an attraction.

The Swan Silvertones – Walk With Me Lord

Walk With Me Lord

The Swan SilvertonesWalk With Me Lord HOB HBX-2112 (1970)


A live album recorded July 4, 1969 at the Baptist House of Prayer in New York City.  The sound is soul-inflected.  This would be the last album The Swan Silvertones recorded with longtime member Paul Owens — his feature “What About You” (renamed “What About Me”) appears early on.  It would be wrong to focus on any individual songs here, though, because this album is more importantly a document of a live performance that is really more than the sum of its parts.  There is a lot of talking and sermonizing in between songs, and “Pass Me Not” is more like “testifying” set to music than a proper song.  Often times the sermonizing segues to the song proper.  Clearly a great deal of practice is reflected in how the group transitions between different songs across the program.  What all this captures on record is the way the group could work up a crowd through multifaceted performance techniques.  And this crowd was clearly enthusiastic about the performance.  Gospel music may have been seeing a steep decline in popularity at this time.  But you wouldn’t guess it from the searing vocals of lead singer Louis Johnson.  This is a good one from the later years of one of the most important groups in gospel.

The Swan Silvertones – There’s Not a Friend Like Jesus

There's Not a Friend Like Jesus

The Swan SilvertonesThere’s Not a Friend Like Jesus Savoy SL-14505 (1979)


Stylistically, There’s Not a Friend Like Jesus (or simply Not a Friend as the back of the album jacket states) is a fairly typical late-period Swan Silvertones album.  The instrumental backing is polished, though the underlying material is too bland for that to matter.  There is surprisingly little singing here.  Louis Johnson is at the front, with only minimal backing vocals.  But Johnson often sermonizes without truly singing.  That makes this a somewhat disappointing album, even with reduced expectations that take into account the generally unambitious nature of the era of the Swans’ career that produced it.  It’s also a bad sign that this is the only Swan Silvertones album to feature an extended electric guitar solo.  This may earn the distinction of being the very worst Swan Silvertones album.

Apparently none of The Swan Silvertones’ recordings for Savoy Records have been released on CD.  But the original LPs are relatively easy to come by for reasonable prices, as the Savoy period is the least interesting of the group’s long career and there are plenty of people out there willing to give up their discs.  The same can’t be said for the group’s earliest material for the King, Specialty and Vee-Jay record labels, almost all of which is readily available on CD.  Material for HOB Records has seen only limited re-release on CD, mostly by way of shoddy “best of” sets and not full-album reissues.  The HOB material is good enough in quality and hard enough to come by that prices for vinyl tend to be a bit high, and the CD compilations often aren’t worthwhile due to being so incomplete.

Miya Tokumitsu – In the Name of Love

Link to an article by Miya Tokumitsu:

“In the Name of Love”

This reminded me of Slavoj Žižek’s observation that it was an obscenity for the Nazis to place “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) on or above the gates to concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz.

See also The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment