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Jeff Lightning Lewis reviews the latest Prewar Yardsale album as printed (in its entirety) in AntiMatters, December 2000 Page 1 | 2 | 3 |
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(I’m writing this review based on an unmastered, cassette copy of Lowdown, given to me a couple months ago when the yet-unreleased album was apparently going by the name Streetfair Tag)Okay check this shit out. The Prewar Yardsale album is fucking awesome. Tony Hightower, in some previous A/M, said he liked the album, but apparently it falls to me to put meaningless vagaries like "lo-fi" aside and tell you all exactly why Mike Rechner and Dina Levy are the coolest writers/performers on the Antifolk scene and why Lowdown is among the greatest scene album releases I’ve ever heard (up there with such notables as Mike’s Wrecked Car, Grey Revell’s Crazy Like An Ambush, Turner Cody’s Saddle Up, and Kimya Dawson’s I’m Sorry That Sometimes I’m Mean, among others). For starters, on a sonically superficial first listen, the addition to Mike’s songs of Dina’s beautifully toneless vocals, and the chemistry between her and Mike, adds to Mike’s already formidable indie-rock credentials. This kind of collaboration provides us with still more genetic evidence of Mike’s heritage from New York art-punk rock royalty, an aural lineage from Lou & Moe to Thurston & Kim (containing a fractal-like reference to Eric’s Trip!) to Ira & Georgia to Mike & Dina. Which is not to say that the addition of Dina makes the sound derivative - PWYS descend from a thoroughbred sonic ancestry, but have birthed a creative offspring as unique as any kid in a noble bloodline. And dig this: on "drums" Dina’s adorable non-expertise allows her to free the expressive potential of percussion from the shackles of rhythm itself! Mike, meanwhile, still has his grip as firmly as ever on the condensed essence of rock & roll. He has a seemingly intuitive mastery of the great rock & roll moment, the moment of greatest tension followed by greatest release, the moment in which the rubberband of a simple blues/rock progression is stretched to its limit before snapping back. This moment is Mick Jagger muttering something like "oh yeah, get down with it" before Keith’s white-hot needle of a solo stabs out of "Sympathy For the Devil"; it’s the breath-taking tiny pause between when Lou Reed says "and then my mind split open" and when the first shard of feedback tears open the second solo of "I Heard Her Call My Name"; it’s the musical pause in which Robert Plant yelps "suck!" before the proto-speedmetal shred of Page’s "Communication Breakdown" solo. In the real world, this moment is the fist pulling back before the punch; it’s the anti-gravity millisecond before the rollercoaster falls; it’s the intake of breath before a scream. It’s the magical, mystical, alchemical moment in which potential energy is suddenly kinetic energy. It’s the moment of sexual tension described by pretty-boy pop star Anthony Keidis when he sez "take it away for a minute just to tease her/then I give it back a little bit deeper" (much as it galls me to include that joker’s name in the same paragraph with the Stones, Velvets and PWYS). Traditionally, it is at this climactic moment of sublime, cosmic tumescence in a rock & roll song that the guitar solo kicks in. Mike may have made a more significant contribution to rock history than anyone realizes by effortlessly boiling that entire big bang into the tiny act of tapping his toe: simply changing the sound of acoustic guitar chord-strum to the sound of acoustic guitar chord-strum plus distortion pedal. Mike sez "so rock the fuck out" and steps on the pedal. Mike sez "hear this again" and steps on the pedal. Mike sez "get down" and just steps on the pedal. He shows you that’s all there is to it, and it fucking works! Talk about AU gold element base table periodic how low can you go! How far can you break down this explosive elemental moment of conception in rock into its basic components? How low can you go, broken down into leisurely-strummed acoustic two chord arrhythmic simplicity, before you can no longer channel the full-force rock & roll big bang? On the periodic chart of the elements of rock & roll, Mike and his distortion pedal form perhaps the most basic molecular unit. How low can you go and still have that nuclear, sexual, rock & roll gold element base? Low down! PWYS achieve more rock on a flimsy foundation, basically do more with less, than the general rock-listening public might think possible. And that’s just the music - hold on to your hats, because what really spins me are the words, and I’m about to indulge in a full-on romp through what I consider to be some of the most unique, bizarre, beautiful, playful and schizophrenically suggestive lyrics in rock. If at any point in the following you think I’m going overboard in my analysis (especially since some of it involves me originally mis-hearing certain words), consider that the simple fact of these lyrics being at least cool enough to suggest possible interpretations is as important as whether my interpretations match with the artist’s intent. In Mike Rechner’s song "Adjective" (on the album of the same name) the lyrics play with numbers of "frequencies" and the chorus states "it’s a noun when you say ‘fuck,’ it’s a verb when you say ‘fuck;’ a DJ, period." I had assumed Mike was referring to a radio disc jockey, "a DJ," or even calling out to that disc jockey "(h)ey DJ!" I was knocked for a loop when Patsy Grace told me that she heard it as "A-D-J Period," i.e., "adj." i.e., the dictionary abbreviation for adjective, hence the list of parts of speech ("noun", "verb," and then "adj."!) and an explanation for the song’s title. It made sense, I agreed, amazed; but I was uncertain that my own interpretation was entirely false, since the lyrics are all about frequencies, suggesting radio frequencies, suggesting the radio DJ, and the chorus about saying "fuck" could be interpreted as some kind of reference to saying "fuck" on the air. Well, is the song about shock jocks, or is it some weirder more inscrutable mush in which we have a lyric section/math lesson followed by a chorus section/grammar lesson? What the fuck is going on here?!? When questioned, Mike remained non-committal. It’s either. It’s both. The more one thinks about it, the more one has to notice just how weird and interesting Mike’s lyrics are, going from a deliberately punk taboo-wallowing (as in Mike’s persistent references to necrophilia, cannibalism, masturbation, violence, substance use/abuse, vomiting, etc., in songs like "Beer State," "Dead Fuck," "Binge and Purge," "Madison Avenue," "Richard Vale," and "Vomit Eldorado," among others), to playful word puns (for example, in "Bicycle Free N.Y.C.": "our spokes spoke... our brakes broke... tires don’t tire"), to an absurdist reverence for mainstream/commercial products (in songs like "Walker," "Betty Crocker," "Kodak Gold," and "Bounty Hunter"), to un-sane poetic images (for example, the fish in "Resistance Parade" rally together to "force the people to eat the dry land" - WHAAAAT?!?!?!?), to lines so beautiful and sad they bring tears to my eyes, despite the fact that Mike’s monotone voice and Long Island accent retain an emote-less even keel throughout all ("low tide girl/shallow pool/rock bottom/no rules" from "Lowdown Girl" is one that always gets me; and multiple times listening to the PWYS album I had to stop drawing my comic book because the phrase "abandoned gutter" blinded my eyes with tears every time "Disney in Times Square" came around - I was practically crying this very minute just from typing it!). Like the Fugs or the Fall, Mike pulls off the trick of creating his own unique songwriting realm in which a seemingly idiotic approach yields idiosyncratic and wonderful results; that is, to those who are willing to penetrate an often belligerently unpolished exterior. So let’s get deeper now; "Adjective" is just an introductory example of the multi-layered meanings one can find in these songs, if one digs into them a bit. Here’s another example: in the "Eldorado" song I had always thought Mike was singing "Hey you Bass," as though referring to a bass guitar tone, an interpretation backed up by the corresponding lyrics "how low can you go... you can go low... support or stand alone," which I thought were obviously references to the musical "bass." Randi Russo was the first to tell me that she heard it as "A - U" not "(H)ey you" and pointed out to me that "AU base" is actually chemistry-class speak for the element Gold, thus the song’s references to the periodic table (thus I guess "support or stand alone" refers to molecules combining or standing alone as diagrammed on the periodic table chart of the elements, although admittedly I did flunk high school Chem). Once again a "Hey" versus "A" situation; damn that Long Island accent! As if deciphering these lyrics wasn’t enough of a riddle! But of course, as the now-released PWYS album clearly states on its tracklisting, Randi was right and the song is actually titled "AU Base." Wow, I thought! Not only that, but this explains why the previously unaccountable chorus is "Eldorado" - because Eldorado is the fabled lost city of Gold! But wait - Mike and Dina don’t quite sing "El" Dorado, but rather "Ill" Dorado - is the Long Island accent confusing things again? Or is there some even more insane meaning that I haven’t quite sussed, linking gold with vomit? After all, Mike does have a song "Vomit Eldorado" in which he sings about getting car sick and throwing up while driving (something along the lines of "the tires slipped/on the trip/the road was long/my stomach churned/every mile/I tasted bile"); one would assume that the car he was driving was a Cadillac Eldorado, right? But "Vomit Eldorado" not only references the car Eldorado, but the mythical golden city itself: "the city of gold/bathed in snow/the light revealed/the vast glimmer field/the path to truth/and then I puked/Vomit Eldorado!/Vomit Eldorado!" Again, what the heck is going on here?!? This is madness! From an initial basic appreciation for his music beginning a couple years ago, I’ve grown more and more attentive to Mike’s lyric writing; it began to make me feel like I was nuts that I started to see things in his songs that no one else seemed to see, and as Spencer Chakedis once remarked to me after I tried to describe some of my findings, "I don’t know who’s crazy here, Mike for writing these songs or you for figuring them out!" Some of the other multi-layered meanings make a bit more sense than the "vomit/gold" and "radio/math/grammar" stuff, if one takes the time to think about ‘em. The opening track on Lowdown is "Elevated Platform Stand," a song seemingly about subway trains, subway platforms and elevated subway platforms. (This is of course all in keeping with an overall hard-liner New York City thing; PWYS is music of, by, and for NYC. Maybe being a life-long New Yorker is what allows me to instinctually dig this stuff more than someone else might?) "Elevated Platform Stand" consists of a typical Mike Rechner two-chord Antifolk grunge groove, divided into two sections by an interminable bridge, in which Mike and Dina take us on a crowded subway ride through a hell of monotony and back. Traditionally, most of Mike’s songs lack a bridge, or "middle eight" section, as some song-crafters call the stereotypical eight-bar bridge that provides a pop-format song with a respite from verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. I have a fantasy that at some point someone told Mike he needed to add a "middle eight" to his song structure to make it more listenable and less monotonous, and in "Elevated Platform Stand" Mike made a retaliatory joke of this criticism by playing a "middle eight" that takes over for eight minutes (on the dot!) instead of eight bars. Actually, what’s really weird is that there’re two puns in one. Mike puns on a "middle eight" by subjecting us to a middle eight minutes of repetition rather than the middle eight bars commonly used to counteract repetition, and he puns on the idea of a songwriting "bridge" by having the song structure and length mimic a subway train crossing a bridge between two stations - talk about matching form to content! This is art. No one who has not experienced this recording in the comfort of their own home can have any idea what it feels like to listen to such a thing. To fully appreciate the immensity of eight full minutes of the "get up/get down/fair is fair" three chord repetition, perhaps a visual representation is in order. ... the continuation |
December 2000 Index Page Jeff Lightning Lewis currently resides in Austin, Texas, but upon his departure, he made me promise I would publish this piece in the print version in its entirety. Which I did, in 4 point type, which came out surprisingly readable. Really. This piece, to my eyes, is semi-crazed but oddly compelling if you stick with it. Take care of yourself, Jeff old buddy. It was fun butting heads with you. You can Let Jeff know what you think of his piece. |