"Made in New York"
Review by Tom Roe, Music Editor

Tom Archives: "No More Prisons", Sonic Youth

Whenever I hear anyone boasting about New York bands I think about how there are more horrible musicians with no ideas of their own here in America's cultural capital than anywhere else on earth. Of course, there are also a few diamonds hidden among the landfills, toxic waste dumps and construction sites that used to be community gardens. Here are a few guaranteed-great records, Made in New York:

Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

With their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, this Hoboken-based trio stood on a precipice. Mainstream audiences, for the first time were listening. And the group was dabbling with technology like never before, just as the word "electronica" became the flavor du jour.  Well, Yo La Tengo have looked over those cliffs, and stopped to reconsider. Sometimes one step back can mean two steps forward, and this inward turn shows the band hasn't lost its stride. Only "Cherry Chapstick" tastes of bubblegum pop here, the rest of this collection, such as "Last Days of Disco" or "Night Falls on Hoboken" is more evocative and moody, like a foggy '40s black-and-white film. This smart trio don't exclude any concept or sound from the realm of possibilities, so there's still a few murmurs and bleeps burbling among the strumming and drumming. But there aren't any wholesale electronic experiments such as Beating's "Moby Octopad." "Everyday," the opener, takes awhile to get started, then contemplates existence from a real-time pace. That's about how this existentialist masterpiece goes. (Matador, 625 Broadway, NYC 10012)

Home
XIV

Last year, the Flaming Lips made the most beautiful dumb record I've heard
since Sebadoh or Superchunk were really good. The Soft Bulletin was a sprawling humanistic plea, told in simple metaphors of gashes and mad scientists and set to a sweeping orchestral swell. Dave Fridmann of Mercury Rev made it all sound so good, focusing the loose Lips like never before. He produces this former Tampa-based band that now occasionally rocks New York bringing together all the disparate elements that sometimes got lost amid the chaos of previous Home records. These aren't Lipstick traces, but the view from Home with the windows cleaned.  They still make weeping indie pop such as "Coming Up Empty Again" or "Thunder & Lightning." There's still baroque, organ-driven progressive rock songs such as "Children's Suite:3 Displaying Prisms" or the Chicago-paen "Chicago." The melodies continue to wander in and out of various musical landscapes within a few bars, or sometimes in the space of a few notes, and Home don't bother hanging their hats on anything close to an expected song structure. But Fridmann brings all these elements out on equal footing with each other, and the results are less like hearing a William Burroughs cut-and-paste version of a high school marching band attempting hip rock tunes, and more like a little pop symphony, like the kind that Brian Wilson used to make. (Arena Rock, POB 632, Village Station NY 10014)

Jackie-O Motherfucker
Fig. 5

OK, OK, Jackie-O Motherfucker are only from New York in the loosest sense (most of this noise collective resides in Portland or Baltimore). But,
they're certainly aligned with Thurston Moore's noisemeisters, and spiritual
kin of Harlem's No-Neck Blues Band. They don't, however, create harsh urban soundscapes. Instead, Jackie-O go all pastoral, with two covers that attempt historical revisionism-the prison camp spiritual "Go Down, Old Hannah" and "Amazing Grace"-at the center of their first CD (after two vinyl LPs). The letterpressed insert cards in Fig. 5's beautiful CD package address both these songs, explaining how "Amazing Grace" was written by English slave trader John Newton and how "it was frightening to hear 'Go Down, Old Hannah'" because the song is about prisoners who would rather die than face another day in turn-of-the-last-century for-profit prisons. Of course, for-profit prisons are back now, and these improv-ing Motherfuckers want to frighten us by singing their own freedom songs about the ties that currently bind. This is an epic, humanistic sprawl from the electronic opener "Analogue Skillet" (with Portland's Nudge) to the final explosive "Madame Curie." The Tony Conrad-like violin tear "Native Einstein" and the lolling ballad "Beautiful September (We Are Going There)" are also highlights, but it's those covers that take Jackie-O soaring to dizzying heights with the weight of the world on their shoulders. (Road Cone, POB
8732, Portland OR 97207)

Tom Roe tomroe@usa.com is a freelance writer who has contributed to New York Times, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, New York Post, Time Out New York, Detour and many other publications. Usually Tom writes about music for The Wire, Magnet, and for a couple years he had an "alternative music" column in the NY Post.   Tom also runs a microradio station, usually based in Williamsburg, called free103point9. In '98 New York mag named them "Best Pirate Radio Station" and this year the Voice did.  They do events, mostly, and people such as Matthew Shipp, DJ Scud, I-Sound, Singe, Daniel Carter, William Parker, Simon Reynolds and Stars of the Lid have been on the air.

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