DEVO: Chicago, the Vic. 11.13.2009, 8 PM Night Two-Freedom of Choice (review)

Chicago, Illinois--Last night's Chicago performance was a barn burner for the many Midwestern fans of DEVO, itself being a Midwestern band going back to the early 1970s. As a matter of fact, the members of DEVO met at Kent State University during the Vietnam War era, some were members of SDS, and bassist Gerald Casale helped organize the antiwar demonstration in the spring of 1970 in which the infamous shootings took place. If you stay in the Midwest long enough, you get as weird as these guys or weirder, mostly from boredom.

Far from being "nerds," or "yuppies," DEVO began as a multimedia arts collective and still operates as one to this day. The real irony in all of this is that they never broke up and have continued to record in their Sunset Strip "Mutato" studio doing soundtrack and commercial work, the most well known being with director Wes Anderson.

Like several other old school punk and postpunk bands that have been touring this year--like the Pixies and even R.E.M.--the spuds were doing entire albums live and in their original running order. Night one was "Are We Not Men?" from 1978 (a punk classic) which sold out so quickly that another night was added to their Chicago appearance. Night two brought the entire "Freedom of Choice" LP from 1980, and yes, "Whip It" was in full bloom with all of its punch and glory. The music hasn't aged and the entire original lineup looked healthier and happier than they have in--well--over a decade, and the mood was celebratory, even for Chicago. From the opening guitar-riffs of "Girl U Want" to the more obscured album cuts like "Gates of Steel" and Mr. B's Ballroom," there was a real sense that this music hasn't aged at all...which was interesting since there were probably no more than maybe two dozen twenty-somethings to be seen. The majority of the crowd was 30-and-up, and with the bar, it was an 18-and-older show. But what the hell, people are broke all over the place these days! The audience was more fun than people watching at Wal-Mart. The icing on the cake was the gorgeous Bettie Page-style model coming out with her boxing-round cards emblazoned with "Track 1," and so on.

Some of the best times I had was looking at all of the former New Wave glam queens, now in their forties and early fifties, but still looking pretty good! Many concertgoers literally hadn't seen the group since the 1980s, or if they were like this writer it was their first time ever. The merchandising will be legendary, but there was nothing especially crass about it and it all appeared to have been made in America. All said, it was exactly what you would have wanted out of a DEVO concert and that includes Mark Mothersbaugh coming out onstage and singing "Beautiful World" in the second set dressed as the utterly grotesque "Boojie Boy," then regaling the audience in a totally surreal account of DEVO's trek to Los Angeles and meeting Michael Jackson, that he was dead, and how great it would be if he could rise from the grave like in the video "Thriller" to tell us all "what a beautiful world it truly is." The brutal truth was that there was no irony to be had!

But really, having been a budding teenager listening to Freedom of Choice when it was new, this was just a real road to Mecca moment, pure bliss. Not only is DEVO still great, they're professional and can still stop on a dime. Most of these guys are hitting their sixties, but the joy and the appreciation were so palpable that Mark Mothersbaugh, and even Gerald Casale, could only smile along with the rest of us and enjoy a very special tour in a very unique cultural moment. One of the greatest surprises of the evening was the dusting-off of a very old DEVO song, "Be Stiff," going back to the mid-1970s, almost one of the earliest songs that they ever did. Hey, they weren't going to do "Oh No! It's DEVO!" (1982) or "Shout!" (1984). Here's to art and crowd pleasers! Whoever said you can't have both in art was wrong.

GreyMachine, the return of apocalypse rock amidst the apocalyps

WWW--Grey Machine is Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal, Napalm Death, ICE, etc.), Dave Cochrane (Head of David), Aaron Turner (Isis), Diarmuid Dalton (Godflesh, Cable Regime, Final), and their first release together that came out earlier this month promises to conquer, especially old school Godflesh fans like myself.

After the 2002 demise of that band, Broadrick moved on to form Jesu, his new rock project, and the first releases were pretty heavy, not that I haven't liked the Eno and postpunk inflections along the way, but...

Let's be honest: the last wide-release album of Jesu ("Conqueror") wasn't very good at all, it had a couple good tunes and lacked any real dynamic and fell pretty flat creatively. The singles, small-run releases on Broadrick's Avalanche imprint, and EPs since then have been a significant improvement even without the heft, the heaviness. If you don't like really heavy experimental music that eschews the rules of genre you won't like this, not that I care.

Apparently Justin was feeling a little wounded by the criticisms coming from old fans like myself and decided to show everyone that he's just as capable of apocalypse rock as he ever was and the first reviews are confirming that Grey Machine's "Disconnected" is that very thing, so it's time to breathe a sigh of relief. A review is forthcoming at this site, but have an ear-bleeding, soul-destroying listen of some song samples here in-the-meantime: http://www.last.fm/music/GREYMACHINE .

"Vultures Descend" is absolutely stunning in itself and also reminiscent of some of the best output by the Swans. Someone has to do the soundtrack to the apocalypse, and that man is Justin K. Broadrick along with his numerous collaborators. Projects like this transcend the boundaries of mere rock music. Enjoy (or don't).

Shameless plug #2: Smolensk, my musical project and (other--beat you) hobby

WWW--Here's a link to a couple of tracks I did recently. Free, and more to come, enjoy. All rights reserved. I wrote them, you didn't. Yes, I took the name from a line of dialogue from Buckaroo Banzai.

SmolensK: http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/artist/Smolensk

The Saddest Song Ever Written: "The Bed," by Lou Reed

No, it's not the "Hungarian Suicide Song." In 1973, Lou Reed was riding high. He had scored a reasonably popular single in the last year off of the LP "Transformer," produced by glam rockers David Bowie & Mick Ronson . That song was "Walk on the Wild Side," and it charted at #16 in the U.S. and #10 in the U.K. What would Lou Reed follow-up his commercially successful glam rock LP?

As Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore so aptly put it, Lou Reed followed-up "Transformer" with the most depressing album ever made. I would add that it also included the saddest song ever written on it: Berlin. The album tanked.

Making the album was so depressing that producer Bob Ezrin, who produced Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, and a gaggle of others, told Reed to "put the tapes in a drawer and forget about it." Everyone plays on Berlin: Steve Winwood, Jack Bruce, the Brecker brothers, Aynsley Dunbar (fresh from Frank Zappa), Steve Hunter, and even Tony Levin! Almost all of them hated the album and the experience.

Before this album, rock just didn't deal much with truly adult themes, and its time had come. After Berlin, things would never be the same. It reflected the horrible disillusion of 1973. Watergate was everywhere, and the war in Vietnam was ending in a very ugly way. Heroin was everywhere. Cynicism was rampant. I don't know how you write a song like "The Bed" at the age of 30-31. You have to lose a lot of people before you even begin to understand what loss means, but it's a testament to Reed's sensitivity to understand the themes in "The Bed."

I never would have started if I'd known

That its end this way But funny thing, I'm not at all sad
That it stopped this way
This is the place where she lay her head
When she went to bed at night
And this is the place our children were conceived
Candles lit the room brightly at night
And this is the place where she cut her wrists
That odd and fateful night
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
("The Bed," Lou Reed, 1973)

In all of American songwriting--at least--I cannot think of a sadder song. Sure, there are a few uplifting moments on Berlin, but they're hard-won. That's just like life, and it's OK to recognize this in our culture. Just two-years-later Reed would foist "Metal Machine Music" on the world, once again rejecting superstardom. Yet, he was just doing what he had with the Velvet Underground--his own thing. Maybe Lou's burned-out nowadays, but he's always going to be the voice of the Velvet Underground and the man who wrote "The Bed."

Jesu's 'Pale Sketches' album (2007) review

Only available directly from the artist in a limited edition of 2,000, this is the hands-down contender for the best of the four Jesu releases for 2007. A lot of readers and fans of Jesu aren't going to like this observation, but I think it's in order: February's release of 'Conqueror' was a mixed-bag that featured some very powerful psychedelic hard rock songwriting (usually compared to early-1990s 'shoegazer rock' like My Bloody Valentine), but it fell flat overall and lacked the emotional power that one generally expects from the artist.

That being said, it's still pretty good and almost sounds very 'up' at times! It all sounds like a strange description of the music from one of the founders of Napalm Death, doesn't it? Conversely, the recent 'Lifeline' EP kills, and it's a sign of real growth. The same could be said about 'Pale Sketches.' A lot of die hard metalheads are going to say this is just another example of how Justin Broadrick lost it long ago (after Streetcleaner), that he sold-out, and that he's gone soft. Like gorehounds, religious fundamentalists, and orthodox punks, who really cares what they think anyway?

The 'shoegazer' comparisons are apt, however, as Broadrick has collaborated with Robert Hampson of Loop and Main (Hampson is the second guitar on the stunning 1992 Godflesh opus, 'Pure'). Loop was a great late-80s, early-90s throwback to droney, fuzzed-out 60s psych, and still ranks highly in the 'shoegazer' pantheon. Do yourself a favor: find Loop and give it a listen, it's the real deal. Conqueror isn't a bad album, but there are some very run-of-the-mill rock standards present on it, a very 'been-there, done-that' affair on about half of the album's songs. I didn't expect a repeat of Godflesh, or even the sometimes extraordinary Techno Animal, or ICE, but there were about four-of-eight songs that really soared. Considering what else is out there right now, that's not too bad. The artist was overdue for a straight-ahead hard rock album, and we can expect every Jesu release to be different from the last.

Granted, all of this is coming from a longtime-fan of the music of Justin K. Broadrick: I've been hooked on just about every release he's done ever since a college acquaintance loaned me his copy of 'Streetcleaner' in late-1991. I don't expect the nihilism or the crushing heaviness in these new releases, but what I do expect from Justin is that his music moves me, that he presents me with a little something that I've never heard before, and to basically do something new somewhere in the arrangements. Even the Beach Boys managed that.

'Conqueror' does manage this occasionally, yet the crowning track 'Weightless & Horizontal' could be considered one of Justin's greatest contributions to rock songwriting. To say it's an epic anthem would be an understatement, it simply destroys while it lifts the spirits, clocking-in at ten-minutes of bliss. 'Old Year' was also a great rocker on Conqueror, and has a very shimmering quality to it, and it has that incredible feeling of yearning that all great music has. That's what one usually expects from Broadrick--something deep, something epic. There just wasn't much of that on Conqueror. Little has changed in the overall sound since Godflesh, but there's a distinct lack of much dissonance with a more harmonized approach. You cannot always be angry, outraged, and crying--sometimes it has to end. What comes after nihilism?

Enter 'Pale Sketches,' which has been available for a little over two-months at this writing. Where Conqueror fails at times, Pale Sketches succeeds-in-spades: it is epic, it is moving, and it speaks volumes on the sorrow and the emotional torture of this peculiar era we're inhabiting. This was also the feeling one got from Godflesh, Techno Animal, and many of Broadrick's countless side-projects up until 2003. Even the first Jesu full-length from Hydrahead (the self-titled 'Jesu') accomplished this with an almost cathedral-like structure. Not so strangely, many of the tracks on Pale Sketches date between '2000-2007,' and Conqueror overlaps the same period. What you have here is an artist with so many sides that it's probably difficult to decide which songs belong on any given release! Considering that this is the first release in seven years from his Avalanche imprint, Pale Sketches ranks as a very special release for Justin in every respect, even with its dismissive title. In many ways, it's exactly what I've wanted to hear for several years from him.

If I would compare the music on Pale Sketches to a particular band, it would be Joy Division. There's a great balance of heaviness, electronics, heavy sound-processing, and that strange tone of sorrow and joy coexisting together. That aesthetic is exactly what makes the music of Broadrick so timeless and so powerful when he's at his best. Songs like 'Dummy' take elements of the very best of UK post-punk with an injection of elements of the present. The result is the future. 'Supple Hope' could have almost been a Godflesh song, except that most of the arrangement focuses on some beautifully-layered electronics and some truly inspired vocals. Guitar is backgrounded, and there is more than a hint of an Eno and krautrock influence in the sounds and arrangements (with a dash of 'Frippertronics' ala' James Plotkin of that other grindcore band Old).

Maybe Justin Broadrick had tired of the crushing sound and nihilism of Godflesh by 2001 (I was also ready for something new), but the sorrow remains fully-intact in all his releases in 2007. The changes in his sound are a move towards the melodic and the poppy. To many old fans, this is sacrilege, and Broadrick has expressed the feeling that he's not going to miss them. Considering many of them are fixated on Streetcleaner, I'd have to agree. Even so, the excitement of creativity, curiosity, and discovery have also carried-over from the years predating Jesu. Half of Pale Sketches comprises songs, while the other half are instrumentals. Every one of them is a classic balance of heavy rock combined with electronics just waiting to be discovered by the curious. Contrary to most of the reviews--and even comments from Broadrick himself--this is significantly more psychedelic than Conqueror.

This miscellany of tracks (as most releases by Jesu are) is the real 'Conqueror,' and hardly a collection of 'Pale Sketches.' It's another great observation that life is a strange combination of misery and joy, beauty and ugliness. That describes the music of Justin K. Broadrick in every respect, especially in his current incarnations. Making those two elements harmonize is what makes some of his work very inspired, even genius. This man has grown, showing us emotional vistas that we never thought possible through his music. The occasional misfire will be well worth it.