TWAS 285: a-ha, Camden, Geneva
glenn mcdonald
www.furia.com/twas
A Monologue for Pressing Ears and Poisoned Skulls
TWAS 285, 13 July 00
a-ha: Minor Earth | Major Sky
Camden: Reel Time Canvas
Geneva: Weather Underground
a-ha: Minor Earth | Major Sky
I owe this expansive mood, for however many moments it lasts, to three
things happening in a fortuitous sequence. Order is important, as the first
was very depressing. Flipping channels during a commercial in something I
meant to see, last week, I came across a random game show with a team of
high-school-age kids (at least, I hope they were no older) attempting to
collaboratively solve trivial multiple-choice questions, ala (where by "ala"
I mean "slavishly ripped off from") Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I watched
long enough to see exactly one question fielded, which was this: "In the US,
how many millions make a billion?" The way the show apparently worked, one
of the kids had to answer this question, and then the team captain could
either ratify their answer or reject it and substitute her own. The first
player, seemingly unfazed by having to take a random guess for lack of any
applicable knowledge, selected "100". The captain dismissed this theory,
with manifest reluctance, in favor of "10,000". "Who knew that?", the host
inquired, after revealing the correct answer, and the camera panned around
the team members. One kid raised his hand, the same look of profound nausea
on his face as on mine, ashamed on his species' behalf that he was being
forced to take "credit" for something so mundane. This was just one question
on one game show, obviously, and maybe those same kids had already aced a
hundred questions I couldn't answer, but I fear that if anything, they got
off easy. How many of them, without four sample answers as guard-rails,
would have known that the answer was in powers of ten, or that a billion is
more than a million? Am I overestimating how fundamental a comprehension of
quantity is? Yes, at their age I got through the math section of the SAT
without error, en route to becoming a thirty-three-year-old Harvard-educated
professional in a field that breathes powers of ten, but I'm pretty sure my
understanding of basic magnitude comfortably predates any of that. The
ambient media environment is full of numbers, full of populations and
fortunes and statistics, and these kids must assume that reporters choose
between "million", "billion", "jillion" and "zillion" according entirely to
whimsy. No wonder they have no sense of scale: they have no sense of scale.
Asking them to explain what the phrase "in the US" was doing in the
question, which is the only interesting detail about it (although to be
fair, I don't recall why I know that there are a thousand US billions in a
UK billion), would be like asking a basset hound to dunk a basketball with
its left paw.
But with this disheartening tableau in my mind, I went to a late movie
at the Harvard Square Theater on Friday, emerging about midnight. The
theater is a block from the children's annex of Wordsworth, my favorite
bookstore, which was re-opening at 12:01am in order to begin selling copies
of the fourth Harry Potter book at the first allowed minute, and while I had
little personal need for haste, since books two and three are still waiting
on my shelves, I was impressed that anybody cared enough about any book to
merit opening a children's bookstore at midnight, when one would expect its
intended audience to be asleep, so I figured I should wander over and do my
part to reward the staff's late night. The narrow street behind the theater
leads straight to the door of the annex, and I was pleasantly surprised, as
soon as I stepped outside, to spot a little cluster of people already
waiting there. A few steps closer, the aperture formed by the surrounding
buildings expanding, I could see that the little cluster was actually part
of a rather larger cluster. Reaching the cross-street, I discovered that the
larger cluster was merely the first segment of a legitimate line, whose
length I could not immediately assess, as at the end of the block it
disappeared around a corner. Later estimates supposed that eight hundred
people showed up, which doesn't include me, since my concern for the store's
feelings quickly transmogrified from a reason to participate to a reason to
come back and get my copy later. I did at least walk the length of the line.
There were kids in costume, kids sitting on the sidewalk racing to finish
book three, kids asleep on parents' shoulders, parents without their kids,
people who appeared to be neither kids nor their parents. I've never seen a
book do this. I thought the first book was fun, but lighter-weight than its
acclaim suggested, but this crowd converted me into a devoted fan. OK, maybe
these kids don't know a million from a billion yet, either, but if they're
standing on a sidewalk in Cambridge at one in the morning in order to get
their copy of a 734-page novel seven hours earlier than they otherwise
could, then I think it's reasonable to assume they're going to learn a lot
of things between now and when it starts mattering. My faith, which is
disintegrated and reconstituted regularly, by incidents exactly this random,
patched itself together again, and I went home happy and hopeful.
The ideal ending to this story, of course, would be that I got home,
took down my copies of books two and three, read them straight through, and
then, dawn having reasserted itself, returned to the bookstore for number
four. In the movie version, I think I meet a girl there, too. In reality, I
went home, read about a hundred pages in the non-Harry-Potter-related book I
was already in the middle of, and then flicked off the light and went to
sleep. But this is the third detail, all the same, because the fact that I'm
back to reading a hundred pages on a Friday night is a function of a very
conscious priority shift. My reading rate has declined steadily over the
last few years, as my day jobs have become more draining, and I've
accumulated more assorted responsibilities and interests with which to fill
my own hours. I disliked that, but there never seemed to be any large blocks
of wasted time. My schedule wasn't so packed, however, that when I
discovered a site that runs an online variant of Boggle, my favorite game,
recently, I couldn't squeeze in a few rounds before bed, or in between
soccer games on the weekend, or while listening to records. Boggle is
somewhat addictive, and after a while my player rating started going up,
which was also somewhat addictive. The "few" in "a few rounds" soon began
losing semantic significance. The more I played, the more familiar the
patterns of the boards became, and the better I got, but the harder it was
to ignore the repetitive nature of the game. "Renter, renters, rented,
dented, enters", I'd type, for the ninth time in one night. Slowly I began
to wonder whether I was really still enjoying the game enough to justify the
time I spent playing it. Well, I didn't spend that much time playing it,
right? Surely not. Actually, the site keeps track of your stats for you, so
I didn't have to speculate. Each round is two minutes long, or three minutes
in elapsed time counting the minute-long pauses between them, so just
multiply the number of games I've played by three, divide by sixty to get
hours, divide by how many weeks I've been playing, and you get hours per
week, which is: yikes, that can't be right. (Let me try it again on a
calculator. No, the good news and the bad news is that I can still
multiply.) I'm not going to tell you how many hours it was. Less than I
spend at work, less than I spend asleep, less than I spend listening to
music, but more than I was spending on any other single activity. More time,
most glaringly, than I was spending reading, especially on nights when I
stayed up late enough playing that I got to bed and never even turned on the
reading light. This, once I had to confront it in numbers, was plainly
unconscionable. Playing Boggle proved that I had time, so I've quit Boggle
and reclaimed it for reading. More reading, and Harry Potter, and beautiful
summer days combine to remind me of coming home from the library with two
dozen books every week of summer vacations (except the ones when my family
took our yearly trips to Colorado, which are even more vivid memories
because for those weeks I got to buy books). The excitement of always being
in the grip of a story is surprisingly and thrillingly easy to reawaken, and
Boggle is no substitute. I feel better, now. My ankle is better, my side is
better, my life is improved. I'd allowed some wonder to drain away, but it's
back now.
And apparently, with renewed wonder and a renewed sense of continuity
comes a renewed weakness for neglected musical forms, as well, for big,
expansive songs that are neither too self-conscious to ask for our
allegiance, nor too cynical to reward it. No other theory presents itself to
explain why I bought the new Kansas album. Sadly, it is awful. Similarly
nostalgic, but much less awful, is Minor Earth | Major Sky, the first new
a-ha album in many years. Treating a-ha as an extension of my childhood is
technically ahistorical, since at the time I thought "Take on Me" was
unacceptably effeminate, but after becoming extremely attached to 1993's
Memorial Beach, which struck me as the album Robbie Robertson, U2 and the
Call never got around to making together, I went back and filled in the rest
of the catalog, and the things I remember disliking about a-ha circa Hunting
High and Low, but now enjoy, seem instructively evocative of the inevitably
large number of other things that I wasn't ready to accept at that age,
either. Minor Earth | Major Sky doesn't sound like Hunting High and Low, but
then, a few children's books notwithstanding, I don't want to relive my or
anybody else's childhood, I just want to remember some of the ways it made
me feel, and some of the ways it didn't but should have. a-ha have grown up
gracefully. The pensive drum loops, rumbling synth-bass and swirling
textures of "Minor Earth Major Sky" remind me more of Seal than any of
a-ha's old New Wave peers. "Little Black Heart" is slow and soaring,
somewhere between Yaz and Roxette, or Midnight Oil and OMD. "Velvet"
oscillates between Morten Harket's understated narration and D'Sound singer
Simone's airy backing sighs with some of the same wide-eyed serenity as the
Primitive Radio Gods' "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in
My Hand". The sequencer runs on "Summer Moved On" remind me of Seal's
"Crazy" again, but the frequent falsetto twists in the vocals trace their
roots back to Spandau Ballet and the Blue Nile. The bouncy "The Sun Never
Shone That Day" misses an opportunity to rebut a-ha's old "The Sun Always
Shines on T.V.", but "To Let You Win", with its chiming synth-bells and
gruff vocals, offers a striking impression of a cross between Bryan Ferry
and Midge Ure. "The Company Man" is slinky, but reserved. "Thought That It
Was You" starts out brittle and spare, but swells into a grand,
vocoder-laced chorus worthy of Anything Box. "I Wish I Cared" is cinematic
and measured, murmuring verses sliding in and out of fluttering falsetto
choruses. "Barely Hanging On" see-saws from verses that sound like
Supertramp rearranged by Pierre Marchand to anguished Thom Yorke-esque
refrains. "You'll Never Get Over Me" is unhurried, and mirrored nicely by
the rumbling, George Michael-ish "I Won't Forget Her". The biggest
ambitions, however, are saved for the finale, "Mary Ellen Makes the Moment
Count", which lashes together whirring organ, muted acoustic guitar,
resonant electric piano, a hushed chorus, keening violins, spiky
mock-harpsichord and clattering timpani, and ends up as an epic amalgam of
the Doors, the late Beatles, Gerry Rafferty, Marillion, Tears for Fears and
the Verve. There are deeper, more significant bands than a-ha, just as there
are more sophisticated children's books than Harry Potter, but art is a
collective project, and not every piece has to alter history. Some of them
play their parts by sustaining awe, or by reminding us how much power even
the simple forms hold, or by leaving us breathless and awake, not only
unwilling to put this one down until we're done with it, but unwilling to
surrender to darkness until we find out what the next one is like.
Camden: Reel Time Canvas
The next one, in my case, is Reel Time Canvas, the debut album by Camden,
who claim to be from Milwaukee, but who sound to me uncannily like a cross
between Puressence and Cody, or between drum-and-bass nervousness,
Radiohead's elegiac stasis and the various surging clamors of Gang of Four,
the Chameleons and My Bloody Valentine. Occasionally, for just a moment, I
can convince myself that I hear a trace of the ragged emo/punk roars of
Braid and Sarge, but if Camden weren't on an Urbana label (Grand Theft
Autumn, producers of two Braid singles and a Sarge split), I'm not sure the
connection would ever have occurred to me. They are as British as Del Amitri
are American. Guitars crash in dense, textural waves, and then suddenly
resolve into sparkling acoustic chords. Drums rattle and pound, half the
time pushing the tempo and half the time swept up in it. The bass throbs
implacably, tracing restless counterpoints instead of following the chord
changes. The vocals sound like an angel on the brink of hysteria, frantic
and becalmed. Songs are structured architecturally, sharply, austerely, like
living-room furniture made of out sheet-metal, or overexposed photographs of
distracted machines. Where Puressence and Geneva mix these angular
assemblies with rousing anthems, though, Camden maintain a strict geometric
discipline, and except for the frayed, Penguin Cafe Orchestra-ish
instrumental "Just Like a Moscow Winter" and one kitschy dialog sample,
these songs could easily be treated as variations on a single theme, as much
parallel explorations of a resolutely coherent aesthetic as MBV's Loveless
or Whipping Boy's Heartworm. Camden belong to the same school of oblique
song-titling as the Chameleons and Trans Am, but in Camden's case the lyrics
are so elliptical and stark, succinct to a cummings-like extreme, that the
few whose titles actually appear in their text are the ones that feel
unnatural. "Mike, Who Is Diary?" seems snipped from the middle of a long
private conversation whose context would take too long to explain. "He
reminds us of ourselves, / We'll settle for anything", accuses "Is Our Face
Red", wondering where to assign blame. "You Seem Capable" fractures like a
relationship song scrutinized through an electron kaleidoscope. "Of Course
I'd Try to Save You" never bothers to explain from what. "How to Make
America Proud" is exhausted but defiant, and I'm absolutely sure that "I'd
rather take a liar than a lie" is defensible, even though I can't think how.
"Not Without Your Blessing" is either tender or helpless. The inane title of
"A C OK, But a D?" hides an SOS smuggled out of an abusive relationship. And
when the album's title finally makes its appearance, as the last three words
of the final song, even that isn't as simple as it seems. "Curtains down, /
We expose onto / Reel, time, canvas." How do we perform when our audiences
are taken from us? We can document ourselves (reel), or we can make symbols
to represent us (canvas), or we can defy Schrodinger and insist that our
actions collapse their own probability waves (time). Or: In private, we
still treat each other like audiences, performing when we ought to simply
talk, unable to stop being the authors of ourselves, and start being
ourselves. Or: We diligently memorialize failures we might have prevented,
and thus allow ourselves to be dragged into our own histories. I realize
these readings are incompatible. Once, in college, I contracted a
debilitating crush on a girl who was writing a thesis about John Ashberry,
and bought one of his collections to try to keep up with her, but I couldn't
follow his poems at all, and her explanations seemed as arbitrary and
inconsistent to me as overlapping constellation diagrams. In retrospect, I
think she couldn't explain the verses any better than I could, but what she
saw, and I didn't, were the patterns that indicate where, not what, meaning
is. Her explications of the poems were placeholders, expressions of her
certainty that the poems meant something. Not understanding this, at the
time, I eventually concluded that she was crazy (which may have been
correct, but only by coincidence). But I think, listening to these songs,
devising an endless series of flawed keys for decrypting them, I'm finally
having the experience she had reading Ashberry. And although writing about a
song you can't explain is arguably inane, listening to it is not.
Geneva: Weather Underground
If musical geography complied with my subjective views of it, Camden would
be setting off on a tour with Geneva about now, the two bands joint
defenders of the belief that Oasis and Radiohead both represent perversions
of the fundamental atmospheric-Brit-pop precepts. Weather Underground,
Geneva's follow-up to their 1997 debut Further, opens with the glorious
"Dollars in the Heavens", my fifth favorite song of 1999, but ironically
this comes close to ruining the album for me. I had nearly four months alone
with the single before the album came out, during which time I became
increasingly eager to hear an entire record of songs just like it, which
Weather Underground isn't. In the meantime, luckily, Travis have more or
less taken over the role I once expected Geneva to fill in my life, and
Geneva, in turn, have become the heirs to Ultrasound's pricklier, less
accessible version of the style. "If You Have to Go" is elegant and
drifting, the music matching Andrew Montgomery's swooping falsetto instead
of contrasting with it. "Killing Stars" lurches and simmers, a groaning,
half-dub bass line shedding shards of guitar and keyboards as it moves.
"Museum Mile" is dissipated, albino-reggae Radiohead. "Amnesia Valley"
gradually coalesces into a seething dirge, only to collapse again. Eastern
wailing and stabs of synth noise punctuate the lumbering instrumental
"Morricone". Parts of "Guidance System" are chiming and invitingly
mid-tempo, but periodically the rhythm section drops out, leaving the song t
o survive on inertia. "Cassie" might have been a sweet pop song, but a
gloomy kick-drum thump and a layer of feedback obscure the melody, while the
reverent backing vocals ruin any hope it might have had of crossing over
into industrial churn. "Rockets Over California" is a weary, apocalyptic
waltz. "A Place in the Sun" is theme music for a decaying orbit. And the
mutilated, buoyant "Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?", the final track,
tries to imagine what U2 might have sounded like if they'd made Achtung Baby
as an evolution of The Joshua Tree instead of a break from it. "Dollars in
the Heavens" augured a cynical album, and about half of this record
delivers, but the other half can't keep up the facade. As the last song
asks, over and over, whether you've seen the horizon lately, the obvious
implication is that they know you haven't, but you're still there to be
admonished, so there must be hope. If a-ha is Harry Potter, then Camden is
less fanciful but more complex, perhaps The Dark Is Rising (Ashberry, as far
as I know, didn't write a fantasy series), and Geneva is Thomas Covenant,
torn between epic and anti-epic, trying to find a way for profound magic and
brutal truth to coexist. All three have their roles to play. We didn't dress
up as bitter lepers the night The Power That Preserves came out, perhaps to
our discredit, but summers are long, and books are short (even long ones),
and Harry Potter unleashes forces nobody can control. What the kids in capes
don't realize, but hopefully their parents do, is that once you allow
yourself to be inhabited by one book, or one record, or one love, you
consign yourself to a lifetime of references and resonances, nostalgia and
disappointments, rediscoveries and relapses and realization. And the pages
go by, whether you can count them or not.
Copyright (c) 2000, glenn mcdonald
The War Against Silence is published weekly at www.furia.com/twas, and
posted to the newsgroup rec.music.reviews. It may not be distributed
elsewhere without my explicit permission.