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Between Dusk and Dawn
There is something about late night. The combination of fatigue, caffeine and halogen lights gives everything an otherworldly character. It’s the time of night where familiar roads appear utterly strange. Anything can happen, and it probably will, if you’re out wandering about. Suddenly the whole world turns into an X-File, with Mulder and Scully nowhere to be found.
Recently, some discs showed up at the radar station that use sounds to recreate the disorientation of pre-dawn hours. Time melts away and the mind drifts. These discs should have warning labels advising possible altered states. Unlike chemicals, your mind must be open for these discs to be effective.
CAFFEINE HALLUCINATIONS
The Covers Record offers sleep-deprived hallucinations based on other peoples songs. Cat Power is an acquired taste; I know some people find Chan Marshall’s minimalist song stylings glorious, but I’ve had a difficult time connecting with her music. It’s too static for my tastes. The Covers Record (Matador) is exactly what the title suggests; a record of cover versions of other artists’ songs. What makes the disc intriguing is what happens when Chan applies her stark and highly personalized song stylings to other people’s tunes. The disc opens with her reading of ‘Satisfaction’, which replaces Mick Jagger’s self-righteous swagger world-weary existential angst. Where Jagger was pissed that he wasn’t getting the satisfaction that the world owes him, Chan sounds resigned to never, ever finding fulfillment. It’s hard to tell how radically Marshall recasts songs by Smog and Michael Hurley, because I’m just not as familiar with the originals. I can testify, however, that Chan turns ‘I Found a Reason’ and ‘Sea of Love’ into spectral ghosts floating through the shadows of darkest night.
THE CALM OF DARKNESS
Places change in the wee hours of the morning. An industrial area, all noise and commotion by day, becomes a surreal sculpture garden at night. The moon casts peculiar shadows. A tower crane becomes a huge metal stork. The cement plant becomes a Greek temple. Dark Edison Tiger (Thrill Jockey) finds Rick Rizzo and Tara Key in a similarly metamorphosed state. Rizzo is better known as guitarist and singer for Eleventh Dream Day. Tara Key sings and slings guitar for Antietam. Both are well known for tearing up stages playing superheated post-Crazy Horse, post-punk rock and roll. It’s almost shocking, then, to find this pair collaborating on an album of ephemeral instrumental works. These songs are quiet and evocative of imaginary landscapes of the soul. Dark Edison Tiger extrapolates new visions from Rizzo’s work with the Boxhead Ensemble. This is perfect for early morning meditations, but I would not recommend driving.
As any photographer knows, lighting is everything. The whole mood of a photograph can be changed by the way light hits the subject. It is said that Ansel Adams used to stand by his camera for hours waiting for just the right moment to capture his magnificent images of Yosemite. Just as moonlight can turn an industrial landscape into art, it can also make monuments and statues seem alive. Just try walking through an old graveyard at night and see if those monuments don’t seem to be following you.
To say the Dirty Three play emotionally charged instrumental music is stating the obvious. That’s what this Australian trio do, when they aren’t off playing with people like Nick Cave. I’ve come to expect good things from this group. Whatever You Love, You Are (Touch & Go) finds the Dirty Three in remarkably fine form. Each song is a perfectly crafted, heartbreakingly beautiful gem. Warren Ellis makes his violin sound like the hopes and dreams of everyone who has ever loved. There is pain, sorrow, loneliness and heartache in his playing, but there is also hope. As long as hope remains, all else can be endured.
STILL STANDING AT DAWN
Dawn brings clarity to the world. Shadows are chased away and people return to their normal pursuits. The insomniac, midnight reveler and third-shift workers fade into the crowd. Coming off an overnight shift, the daytime world looks strange. It’s not quite the way you remember things, yet here you are.
Journey to the End of the Night (1/4 Stick) is not quite the way you remember the Mekons. For those who remember the Mekons as hell-bent, reckless punk rock survivors slicing and dicing the copse of rock and American roots music, the somber tones of this new release will be positively shocking. Have the Mekons turned into mellow ballad singers? Has the rock and roll juggernaut finally run out of gas?
Journey to the End of the Night demands repeated listenings. Everything you expect from the Mekons is still there. The volume and velocity has been turned down, but the songs still hit home with devastating power. For over twenty years the Mekons have used music to rail against the status quo without making much of a dent; Journey is the Mekons’ confession that it has all been futile. The rebellion that fueled their earliest music is now being repackaged for nostalgia tours. You come to understand the loss embodied in the lines “all the passion in my bones/runs down the gutter to the sea/If I try to tell you how I feel/I’m scared I might disappear.”
So how do you carry on when you know you can’t win?
Well, what is winning? Gamblers know that the games always favor the house, yet they keep on playing. The object becomes not so much hitting the jackpot, but just to stay in the game as long as possible. A similar spirit of defiance emerges as Sally Timms sings “The wish comes true but not by wishing” on ‘The Flood’. ‘Cast No Shadows’ rings the marching tune of an army of darkness, “on a journey with no end in sight”. Conventional rock dreams are turned inside out on ‘Power & Horror’. By the time we hear Tom Greenhalgh singing of longing and desperation on ‘Neglect’, we know we’ve arrived on a different shore. Tom sings of separation and loss while still clinging to a private hope that somehow he’ll still pull things together. By the time we get to ‘The Last Night On Earth’, we’re standing in the cold gray light of day. We’re battered, broken, disillusioned, but still standing. The game goes on. We’re not contenders anymore, but we haven’t been silenced, either.
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