LiliputLiliput (Kill Rock Stars)
I’m not Tina Turner.
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And anyway, screw Keats–Negative Capability is also a record by the Urinals. It’s lucid and clean (remastered for CD!), but not publicly presentable (they were called the Urinals, for fuck’s sake)–the opposite of fake-objective journalism or responsible pop culture. Rickety, awkward, and personal, the Urinals never matured, softened, or grew overly competent. You could hear the music-making parts grinding together. The songs were intense, hooky, and raw, like sweet and sour mangoes in summer: too short to “develop,” they burst with grainy juiciness. Lacking the clenched aggression people used to associate with punk and now connect with bad metal, they just walked up, said something that stuck in your head and then split. The Urinals had the negative capability to avoid what they didn’t have to say, that clean official stuff with no content, everything other than what moved the song forward until it stopped. Real negative capability: an experiment with lack.
The Art of Self Defense by High on Fire, who distill everything gory about Black Sabbath, starts with that kind of wake-up call. Actually, it evokes my favorite Christmas scene ever: my friend Sam and I are trying to see Dungeons & Dragons at 600 N. Michigan. We go across the street to kill time looking at body glitter in the Guess store–and we catch this guy in a Santa suit, playing guitar for donations on the corner. He’s trying hard to play the oldest, easiest dunce-metal riff in the book–Sabbath’s “Iron Man”–and failing. He keeps stumbling, falling off at three and a half beats to the bar, four and a half, the notes never line up: this guy suuuucks. Half an hour later we’ve seen all the slutty sequined clothes we can handle and he’s still there, lurching through “Iron Man,” falling on his face, smearing a joyfully unsound noise all over the Magnificent Mile. It made our night. High on Fire’s album opens with guitarist Matt Pike doing the same thing, throwing his body into every lurch. After he almost plays his riff four times, choking it off each time with thick, ropy wads of delay and never coming in at quite the same place, the rhythm section slams in behind him on the beat and he locks into its timing. The playing isn’t transparent; it’s superkinetic and alive: the Sabbath imitator kicked hard enough in the ass to knock his lurch into a full-tilt run.
A band called Y Pants did the same thing around the same time as Liliput but seemed to make no impact at all outside their native New York. Their complete works were issued on CD about three years ago by a Minneapolis label, Periodic Document, that seems to have issued nothing else since. Y Pants were a trio of plugged-in scene people–for example Barbara Ess, who played bass and ukulele and sang, edited an arts magazine called Just Another Asshole, collaborated with Glenn Branca, and is now a photography prof at Bard. They made the Lower East Side seem like a beautiful and creepy universe that belonged just to them and their screwed-up boyfriends. In the heyday of no wave, while people were trying to blow each other’s legs off with sheer edgy hate, they did a very calm song about washing a sweater. Specifically, they said they weren’t able to wear it because it wasn’t dry yet, and later told us “don’t be afraid to be boring.” The song thumps and chimes without needing to snarl; it’s raw in a crisp, refreshing way. Another song, “Off the Hook,” takes the Stones tune about being blown off and lays it over a nonchalantly lopsided beat. The song’s simple, painful story leads you onward until the rhythm works–it’s like walking on crutches, awkward and tentative, but also exciting and new. Y Pants’ “cover version” of the Emily Dickinson poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” about leaving both your things and your body, is built on an organ riff catchy enough to power the hookiest 70s funk song: with all hook and no funk it leaves you feeling weird but happy. “That’s the Way Boys Are,” the final song from their LP, is Lesley Gore’s sad song of accepting humiliation at her boyfriend’s hands. Y Pants chant it straight, but someone in the background starts shrieking as if her throat were being cut. It’s the most violent sort of riot grrl sentiment, slipped effortlessly into a 1950s shell (because people felt that way in the ’50s too).
