Zinn, Zines and the Old Weird America: the Music of the Bedlam Rovers

I submitted this to the Lamp magazine; the silent response suggests it’s not in their wheelhouse. If anyone’s interested in syndicating this piece, though, let me know. I might be able to augment it with interviews of the band members.

Wer kennt eigentlich die Bedlam Rovers; hat tatsächlich schon einmal ihre Musik gehört? “Who actually knows of the Bedlam Rovers, or has heard their music before?” asks one of their interviewers. Enough people have heard of them, it seems, that Alternative Tentacles dropped their name in a band description, and they have an entry in Pietro Scaruffi’s (who?) archive of obscure rock bands; so they have, or had, some relevance.

At first glance their name seems like another silly indie-rock nonce, the coupling of two words that mean nothing together; but separated, “Bedlam” and “Rovers” begin to ring bells, because both are common tropes in Irish-music band names. (Think “the Bedlam Boys” and “the Irish Rovers.”) The Bedlam Rovers started thus, playing “sham-rock” in San Francisco at the “semi-legal” Club Komotion run by members of the band; former D.C. punk ”Li’l Mike” Martzke has uploaded a few YouTube clips from this period, when he sang for them. At this point their ethos came from brothers Andrew (drums) and Jeremy Doyle (mandolin, bouzouki), who briefly gaelicized their name to “O’Doughaill” as part of the bit. In this period they recorded a riff on Black Flag’s “Rise Above,” recognizable only from the title and from snatches of its music, and a few songs for local compilations.

By the time of their Frothing Green album the Rovers were starting to move away from the Irish style, and guitar player Marko Sakmann started writing anarchist-pastoral lyrics for the music the band was jamming on. One of the best of these is the “Bizness Suit Hoedown,” the story of a group of former tenants who take over their gentrifying apartment building, and squat there to the discomfiture of the “upgrad[ing]” landlord. Sakmann also predicted that “if the rents keep goin’ up… much higher” in San Francisco, “we’ll be livin’ in the street, keepin’ warm by a fire.” One thinks grimly that this was more than rhetoric.

In spite of its first-album shortcomings (prolix lyrics, some bland music, rhythms that don’t exactly rock), Frothing Green has a utopian charm that their other albums would mostly lack. The Rovers had a cynical, even nasty streak from the beginning, expressed in their un-patriotic “XTC Waltz,” and that cynicism came to the front on Wallow in 1992, after Jeremy O’Doughaill left. His brother Andrew stayed to play drums on the next album, but Jeremy seems to have taken with him the band’s stock of traditional melodies and willingness to continue playing old Irish music. A Boston concert taped by Francis “The Wrong Hero” DiMenno features only one traditional song, “Home Be Bearna,” which appeared on Frothing Green — most of the show is comprised of new songs from Wallow (which featured only one Irish song, “Hot Asphalt”) and a couple that would show up on the equally ingrown Land of No Surprises.

With their second record, Wallow, the Rovers’ music became as alienated as their lyrics. Clunky dissonances give away the guiding hand of a guitar player, in “Heaven Song” and “Count to 20” and “Eat My Pie.” Some of the lyrical targets are the usual objects of feminist-progressive hang-ups — Columbus, General Custer (twice), the Marlboro Man, G.I. Joe — but many others indicate an engaged, historically literate, and thoughtful leftism. At the end of “Big Drill,” over one of the mightiest I-IV vamps you’ve never gehört, Caroleen Beatty blasts the atom-bomb project at Los Alamos and the prospect of mining Antarctica. (Marko Sakmann takes an admirably hard line against the Bomb, in “Big Drill,” “Nevada,” and the next album’s “Flat,” a song about the crew of John Wayne’s last film catching the fallout of a nuclear test in New Mexico.) Marko also turns in complaints about performative liberal activism and crunchy Californian lifestyle politics, and an accidental refutation of materialist anthropology:

I have books and time to spend
And I have a soul and I have friends
And I have a home and I have food
And still I have a bad fucking attitude

And the cynicism and political orientation aren’t total even on Wallow: they give way briefly to a beautiful, childish reverie in “Nevada”:

On the map there’s a big gray square
They said don’t worry, there’s no water down there
And I have a friend who talks to the trees
He says he’s never seen trees on their knees

The song is an anti-nuke protest, so obscure that its meaning is impossible to detect without the liner notes of the Don’t Forget! single; but what red-blooded American could hear about a big square on a map and not feel again his childhood yearning for the Platonic tan canvas of the Mojave, for the verdant banks of the Colorado River, for a drive up Going-To-The-Sun Road between ten-foot walls of plowed snow, and all the other wonders of the “incredible shrinking West” (one of Marko’s priceless coinages, from “Bob the Mechanic“)? “Nevada’s” equivalent on Land of No Surprises is the sympathetic “Kerosene” (not the Steve Albini song), a ballad in which “on angel’s wings” a poor, abandoned Middle American drunk “rises/To dance another jig/In the land of no surprises.” And its proxy on Frothing Green is the title song, where Marko lays out the difficulties in building a moral present on the foundation of a corrupt past. Though the Rovers find little worth venerating in history, the struggles of human beings past and present earn their respect — also very American.

Bob Christgau once said that the American musician is always “closer to down-home funk than his… English counterpart.” Accordingly, the Bedlam Rovers’ American-communitarian ensemble sound, like the best county-fair band that never was, makes them much better rockers than the Mekons and other British post-punk groups they get compared to. And their sense of humor makes them much more fun to listen to than the undergraduate despair of the Gang of Four. They never fully developed a sonic signature like, say, the Cows, but one is thankful that they found such good fiddle players — the countermelodies played by Cindy Wiggington, Shannon “Squeaky” McGuire, and Morgan Fichter enliven songs that would’ve otherwise seemed a little wooden. (I say with all affection that Marko Sakmann has one of the worst guitar tones I’ve ever heard.)

Given their traditional and historical engagements, it’s tempting to say that the Rovers make “old weird American” music, to use a term coined by Greil Marcus to describe the Basement Tapes’ connection to prewar American folk music and culture. Tom Waits, with all his faults and accomplishments taken together, is arguably our most famous monger of the “old weird America” concept; Neil Young and John Prine sometimes trade on its tropes. Other roots-impressionist indie-rock groups, like the Walkabouts or Genghis Angus or the Little Saints, fit the bill. But what I found attractive about the Bedlam Rovers, when I first heard their Roll Over EP in July 2019, was that their tough-minded music matched their status as activists instead of aesthetes, rarely bourgeois enough to pine for a place where the circus never ends. In that German interview the bassist, Greg Snyder, rejects the prospect of abolishing work, saying that “every society needs a structure in which people work for common cause. You have to work to live.” At their best they bring to mind instead that ultra-American folk communist Woody Guthrie, whose sharp political instincts were grounded in humane outrage at injustice and joy in human potential. Guthrie’s liberal, social-gospel Christianity and moral optimism, the original planting soil of communism, have been mostly (inevitably?) abandoned by later American leftists; they were slowly replaced by the rage and pessimism which characterize the Bedlam Rovers’ later music. But little bits of that grounding love show through all the time, in the (probably) unironic praise of country life in “Laughin’ Babies and Sneezin’ Dogs,” in the acedia of “Difference” and “Emily” and John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” in the demands for dignity on “No One’s Illegal” and “Bizness Suit Hoedown” and their rave-up on Billy Bragg’s “To Have and to Have Not.”

Their take on religion is pretty bog-standard. At the Boston concert they introduce their own “Peace Train” as a song that “calls for the death of Cat Stevens,” alluding to a tabloid-baiting comment which the newly minted Yusuf Islam later retracted. And in “Count to 20” they inform a “cowboy” that “not all the Indians have… repented of their sins,” as though pious hypocrisy were the besetting sin of Dodge and Virginia Cities. But the protagonist of “Emily,” one of my favorite Rovers songs, kneels down to pray at the end of her song. It’s unclear whether she perseveres, when the lyric says “Never believe in divine saving/A last resort, a chocolate craving”: is she saying this to herself, or is the narrator scoffing for her? Either way, the Rovers’ humanism and love of justice gives Christians like me reason to hope: that saying that “if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention,” is almost as true of faith as of politics. And your correspondent, who was not always a Christian, recalls that he did some of his scoffiest scoffing just as his own knees were beginning to bend.

“King Animal” by Soundgarden – Double Feature Part 2

The quality tracks in King Animal form a kind of bell curve. It starts out weak with the hilarious self-own “Been Away Too Long” (Chris really sings the lines “No one knows me… No one loves or hates me”), picks up with “Non-State Actor” and really gets going with “A Thousand Days Before.” It starts to give out with “Halfway there” and just kind of collapses in “Eyelids Mouth” and “Rowing.” I tend to stick to the middle tracks.

Many of the lyrics are defamiliarizations of life as a dad. It’s as simple as that. Soundgarden has moved back in from surreal descriptions of being drunk and depressed to surreal descriptions of a father’s anguish over his children’s future. They cease to mystify during the Chris Cornell solo track, “Halfway There,” but the rule otherwise holds, throughout “Bones of Birds” and “Worse Dreams” and “Black Saturday.” It’s better for the obscurantism, too: normal reports of life wouldn’t work as well with these titanic riffs, which is why “Halfway There” is built on chords and pop strumming. And from Badmotorfinger onwards, Chris Cornell had developed his own dream-language as surely as did Kurt Cobain and Jerry Cantrell and Ben McMillan, a symbological tendency that elevates his reports of his sorrows into a different realm from the one they started in. We don’t talk enough about how good the Seattle-grunge lyricists were at encoded surrealism, with minds fed by comic books and monster movies and punk rock. It seems that to distract themselves from their drab situation, they made up stories to tell each other. Soundgarden have continued and developed their own storytelling in this vein.

As a Catholic I also notice that some religious elements show up in King Animal. I detect not one, but two skeptical meditations on the religion of Antichrist, in “Non-State Actor” and “By Crooked Steps.” Kim Thayil’s parents were Christians from Kerala, and lapsed Catholic Chris Cornell died an Ortho-bro — perhaps, like many other dads, they reconnected with their Christian faith, and explored the conspiratorial end of its eschatology. I don’t love the music as much as I do on the other tracks, but these are deep thoughts they bandy about in these songs, and their easy and allusive conversation with them makes me think they’ve got a solid grip on them, a grip it’s difficult to sustain if you’re not already a Christian with a healthy suspicion of the world and the flesh. Or maybe the lyrics are just meant to be spooky and silly with their vague messianism. I don’t know, but I know what I want to believe.

I like the new pastoral element in Soundgarden’s songwriting, in “Bones of Birds” and “Blood On the Valley Floor” and others. It reminds me of the Yellowstone trip my family took in 2014 or ’15, on which I first listened to King Animal. “A Thousand Days Before” is the best at evoking this pastoral feel and probably my favorite song on the record. “Taree” cries out for reinterpretation by some bass-voiced modern country singer looking to raise his hard-rock credibility. And you could put on songs as easygoing and funky as “Non-State Actor” and “Eyelids Mouth” at a barbecue, and I don’t think anyone would bat an eye. At least, not any more than they would at Captain Beefheart’s “Owed t’Alex” or something weird but Zeppelin-y like that.

All these factors make King Animal my second-favorite Soundgarden recording: it’s not as diverse or consistent as Down On the Upside but it shares its good vibes, which Superunknown and Badmotorfinger lacked.

“Down On the Upside” by Soundgarden – Double Feature, Part 1

I’d argue that this is the White Album to Superunknown‘s bleak, technological Revolver. Down on the Upside pastiches and fondly acknowledges various rock subgenres: hardcore punk, cryptic floaty deconstructions, Chris Cornell’s sad-Beatles singles, Soundgarden’s usual updates of Seventies hard rock. A lot of the material sounds half-written, like “Rhinosaur” and “Never Named” and “Dusty.”

The serious tracks, Cornell’s sad-Beatles singles, are roughly equivalent to “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”: scattered as they are among the silly ones they sound a bit self-serious, leftovers from Superunknown‘s chilly diamond-cut depression. But “Pretty Noose” and “Blow Up the Outside World” and “Burden In My Hand” and “Tighter and Tighter” give the album some range even when they sound a little out of place. Like Matthew Walther says of the original, part of the fun is sifting through these tracks over the years to find new points of interest. It’s not unified and probably not as suited to deep listening as the Beatles, but Down On the Upside rewards faithful fans with ranging or changing tastes.

And above all these, it’s fun! When they all rock out on “No Attention” and “Ty Cobb” and jam on “Tighter and Tighter,” the Soundgarden dudes are reliving their youth, bending their master chops to a downpressed style. It’s so hard to find fault with old pros enjoying themselves, and with having fun in general. There’s a reason why people are generally fond of Bob Dylan’s goofy throwaway “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” but hate the similarly junky, but bitter and hateful “Ballad In Plain D” from the same album. Superunknown is admirable, but it makes a little pit in your stomach: “Like Suicide”? “Fell On Black Days”? “Let Me Drown”? “Limo Wreck”? These are not happy songs, they’re not easy to listen to. You have to be really good to justify sad songs, or people will make brutal fun of you. You don’t have to be as good to play jollier songs, and it’s less emotionally demanding for both listener and performer. For these reasons, although it’s not perfect, I think Down On the Upside is my favorite Soundgarden record. I’ll talk about my second favorite, King Animal, in part 2.

“From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah” by Nirvana – Review

I have a conspiracy theory. The Nirvana guys must have seen a little bit into the future when they started assembling From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. In their shared gut they foreknew all the bland greatest-hits compilations that Courtney Love and Geffen Records would release, centering “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart-Shaped Box” and a few other mealy radio hits from Nevermind, and they resolved to take action. And to maximize its nastiness and to hide their handpicked greatest-hits compilation from the Dee Gee Cee, they disguised it as a cash-in live album.

Originally it was supposed to be sold with the Unplugged show as a double-CD called Verse Chorus Verse, and would’ve featured “Dive,” “Serve the Servants” and a few other tracks that didn’t make the final cut. Had they followed through and released this version — I’m not kidding — you would never really need another Nirvana CD. As it is I’ll hang onto my In Utero and that rarities compilation with the horrid name, but only lightly, with my fingernails. I don’t listen to them much anyway.

Honestly these versions aren’t as good as the studio ones, especially vocally, and the recordings are even more limited than soundboard tapes usually are because of the band’s crappy equipment. But I’m fond of these deficiencies because they give Wishkah a homey feeling — it’s like a mixtape made by a friend who knows quite a bit about Nirvana but has his own distinct taste. And who’s better prepared to make this mixtape than the members of the band? People will tell you that “Sliver” and “Aneurysm” are neglected classics, but how many Nirvana fans, even those in the know, had heard “Spank Thru” before Wishkah introduced them to it? (I had, but that’s beside the point.) Given discretion over the project I would’ve added “Serve the Servants” and “Frances Farmer,” and cut “Polly”; but then I’d just be a lonely schlub with his perfect Nirvana comp. I’ll take Krist and Dave’s instead, for commiseration’s sake.

“Blue Wonder Power Milk” by Hooverphonic – Review

I was writing a poem a few months ago and about six lines in I needed a word to rhyme with “magenta.” (It wasn’t actually the color of the flowers I was thinking of [yes, the poem was about flowers, go away] but it seemed like a literary word for “pink.”) So I consulted RhymeZone and their exemplary rhyme, “magenta/agenda,” was taken from a song titled “Magenta,” by the band Hooverphonic. Out of curiosity I looked up this “Magenta” track on YouTube and was won over by the whooshy synth noise — I really like when electric instruments make wailing noises in between the notes — so I took an interest in the album.

Now I listen to this precious Belgian trip-hop record at least once every week or two. The chief accomplishment is Andrew Callier’s production, more than the songwriting or instrumental virtuosity, though these are also very good. Remember those big fake synthesizer-swell feelings I mentioned in my recent Adore review? Blue Wonder Power Milk brings those in spades, on a wide synth palette and with great sensitivity to chord shapes. The surf-guitar performances are marvelously simple and all the effects are deployed just right, especially in “Club Montepulciano” and “Lung.” I could do without the male vocals but the female ones are quite good. The lyrics are mostly late-Beatles nonsense, sometimes even within late-Beatles arrangements like in “Electro Shock Faders.”

One less objective association it holds for me is my idea of contemporary Europe — that is, this record feels very much like I imagine European cities were like in the nineties. I went on a family trip to Italy last summer and Blue Wonder Power Milk just reminds me a lot of the big Italian cities we visited, even though we didn’t go clubbing and mostly visited the big old tourist destinations, monuments and churches and stuff. But this reminds me very much of my mental picture of glamorous neoliberal-era nightlife. There’s a short and diverting blog post I ought to write on the “globalist sound” that some late-nineties, early-oughts records have, e.g. Björk’s Debut and Arto Lindsay’s Mundo Civilizado; but I have a bedroom to clean right now.

With repeated listening, I’ve come to really appreciate the second half. The singles are frontloaded, but ultimately tricky tracks like “This Strange Effect” and “Renaissance Affair” have become my favorites. The later, harmonically interesting songs have stayed with me even after “Eden” and “Lung” and “Dictionary” have worn a bit thin.

“Adore” by the Smashing Pumpkins – Review

Billy Corgan has done us a favor by concentrating all of the blasphemies and most of the smut in track two, “Ava Adore,” and it’s a shame that he sacrificed such an excellent backing track to such icky lyrics. (And in all six discs of the deluxe reissue [how many people bought this freaking CD the first time?!] there isn’t an instrumental version.) There’s nothing more to be said of it.

Like many American schoolchildren in the past twenty years I owned the Smashing Pumpkins’ Rotten Apples compilation in middle school, and I would blast it on the bus and between classes, identifying with the early songs’ paper-thin alienation and fourth-generation copies of Jimi Hendrix riffs. The Adore excerpts puzzled me, and the title track I found repulsive (children have at least some ingrained morality); I didn’t hear anything attractive in them during my early teenage years.

Now that I’m all grown up I can finally hear it, for two reasons. First, most of these songs play up Corgan and his co-producers’ gift for big pop drama. Billy’s version of that drama inclines gothic, on the title track, on “Daphne Descends,” on “Shame,” on “Crestfallen” and other great songs. In others that drama becomes the stuff of confessional seventies pop, like “To Sheila,” “Dusty & Pistol Pete,” “To Martha” and the piercing “Once Upon a Time,” one of the few really affecting rock-star-loses-parent songs I’ve heard; and sometimes, probably because of his collaborating producers, it comes out in the fake but nonetheless huge emotions of swelling synthesizers, like in “Appels + Oranjes” and “Tear” and “Perfect.” That kind of pop drama was missing from the first couple of Pumpkins records, which are mostly focused on riffs and intricately arranged “rock” songs, and only with the Mellon Collie album do I think they started to work out what pop music (rather than rock) is about. In fact, studying the first four Smashing Pumpkins albums could help a lot of musicians accelerate their own development, sharpen their pop edge.

The second reason I enjoy Adore more is that the stakes seem higher. In some of these songs Billy begins confront real problems, like his mother’s death, his unworthiness of love in “Crestfallen,” and desperately unhappy women in “Annie-Dog.” Of course many of the songs are silly melodramas, like “Behold! the Night-Mare,” “Daphne Descends” and the least gripping murder ballad ever published, “The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete.” (Have you ever heard Bob Dylan’s version of “House Carpenter,” or the Anthology original?) But even then, these are a long ways ahead of the generic edginess of the first two records, of the astrology bullshit he’s always slipped in and out of, and even Mellon Collie‘s nostalgic pop. And the gorgeous textures save even the silly songs. I’ve never been a “goth” kid but Adore make a solid argument for it — if you can listen to all six and a half minutes of “Shame” without once wishing to trudge through an ash-colored landscape with nothing but your sadness and your old iPod, you must still have a heart (unlike goth kids). Misdirected latria aside, Adore is a very good record.

A Defense of Cheesy Popular Piety

America, America, God mend thine every flaw  – Katharine Lee Bates, verse #2 of “America the Beautiful”

If I told you there exists a c. 2013 blog called “The Catholic Jedi Academy,” would you guess it was

1. A groan-worthy attempt to evangelize the young in the style of much-ridiculed youth pastors, or
2. A source of serious moral teaching, co-run by a priest, chock-full of bracing and Spirited denunciations of both obvious sins (pornography use, abortion, occultism) and those that are a little too close to home (coddling one’s vices, or “being nice“)?

I’d forgive you for thinking #1 because that was what I expected when I first found the Catholic Jedi Academy, whose huge masthead depicts then-new Pope Francis holding an IHS lightsaber and whose admin calls himself “The Assistant Headmaster” like a Harry Potter character. I clicked through a few pages expecting to get a laugh; I left chastised.

I haven’t thought about the Catholic Jedi Academy in months and I wouldn’t have again, except that I signed up in late July for a forty-day novena to prepare for the Feast of the Assumption. “Let Freedom Ring: 40 Days to Freedom From the Devil” is on a site called “U.S. Grace Force,” and Day One’s meditation indicts the decline of the “American Dream,” which the site’s founders say used to be “the ability to act rightly and freely and set one’s course independent of one’s socioeconomic status.” This aesthetic, however, masks a muscular program of achievable yet still sacrificial penances and exercises, one that really helped me inasfar as I persisted. These cheesy websites tell us something important about popular piety.

Praise for America and its ideals has been extremely unpopular among Catholic intellectuals since at least the time of Triumph magazine, and has currently reached an all-time low with the coincidence of the Internet, widespread higher education for students with poor prospects, and conspicuous American moral decline. American Catholics since Orestes Brownson have found fault with the content-free founding principles of the country and with the selfishness it conditions in its people, as have European observers like John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle (Ruskin’s Unto This Last, in particular, contains some quiet but furious attacks on American public and economic life). One of the most recent American Catholics to do this was L. Brent Bozell Sr., whose “Death of the Constitution” argued that the Founders may not have supported the progressive-liberal social campaigns that are currently sweeping the country, but the Constitution they drafted does nothing to protect us from them, because it tries to ground itself in the will of the governed instead of the revealed Will of God handed down to the Catholic Church. These are true critiques and they should be stated and studied, else we Christians would be as confused as Brownson once was, when he measured the gap between America’s self-praise and the actual state of its res publica.

Yet they are not the last word. Around the Fourth of July I remember hearing that Saint Leo XIII praised “great [George] Washington” and the latent Christian potential of America, even as he quietly criticizes America’s presumption that civic virtue can be found outside the Church, in the encyclical “Longinqua.” There were certainly cutting criticisms to be made of Washington, for his deism and slaveholding and membership in the Freemasons; but the Holy Father did not make them. Instead he praised what he found good in his subject and advised the bishops on how to improve upon America’s natural deficiencies. His words could never be used to support the depredations of America on the natives or on enslaved black people, or its moral and religious errors; but they certainly promote the urgent development of good phenomena and traits, building on what already exists.

Internet Catholics, of whom Brownson and Bozell are predecessors, have been moving decisively away from reconciling American life and principles with Catholic ones, and towards a sort of politically progressive, separatist bohemia. Their disagreement is not with Church teaching, but with their parents’ concessions to American society and with the style (which says a lot about the substance) of American Catholic practice — the silliness and lack of gravity in many vernacular Masses, the cozy and unsacrificial lifestyles, the unwillingness to imagine futures beyond the present American political and patriotic order. Some of them are “Weird Christians,” whose name derives from the leftish Internet bohemians of “Weird Twitter,” and in moving in this direction they have picked up some of the glum, snobbish cultural tendencies both of Weird Twitter and of previous Catholic intellectuals.

When I was on Twitter, I remember that one acquaintance said she hoped the strange principles within Protestantism would develop over time and show everyone its misbegottenness within a few generations; I agreed for a while, but over time and with spiritual reading I have become more conciliatory, and I wish now to play up similarities between Catholic life and the best the world has to offer outside the Church. Conversions are more easily won through affinity than through its opposite. I don’t mean that I accept religious and moral errors, or that I wish to cover up the systemic sins of the order I live under, or that I want to live under a simpering pluralism that would force me to accept everyone else’s public sins as “sufficient for them.” I already live there and I hate it — every blasphemous word from someone’s mouth is like a knock to my head, every image of iniquity a source of struggle, every ignorant and fallacious argument a cause for grief, every remembrance that I’ll soon start paying taxes to subsidize Planned Parenthood and the United Fruit Company and the finance industry and the CIA a temptation to despair. I get too caught up still in hating the society of the flesh. This is why I must make a conciliatory effort: otherwise I’ll become a raw mass of scar tissue, so angry at the blades that threatened Saint Perpetua on the ladder of divine ascent that I cut myself on them out of spite. And Weird Catholic Twitter’s hatred for the reign of sin matches that of the U.S. Grace Force.

In short, to be angry and “weird” is understandable and fashionable, and websites like the Catholic Jedi Academy or U.S. Grace Force are intensely unfashionable. Not only do they aim to reconcile being a good Catholic with the tawdry aesthetics of online American patriotism or of Star Wars fandom, they do it without intending to snub the separatist element in American Catholicism. They don’t even think about Internet Catholics, they just try to serve Catholics via the Internet. In the Twitter parole, they are “offline.” Irony-poisoned online people find the sanctification of Star Wars and ‘Murica appalling, and they’re not the first: contempt for lower-class culture is an ancient pastime for refined people, even refined Catholics. I’m often surprised by the venom with which upper-class Catholics attack cheesy piety: Thomas Merton, for example, disparaged the decay of French Catholicism into sentimentality, and F. Reid Buckley dismissed “nearly anything written about the Virgin Mary or the saints” as literary garbage.

This consuming disgust was one of the reasons why I left Twitter in January, and have mostly stopped reading it (putting aside how the site hath enlarged itself, and was never satisfied with the time that I put into it). It’s not that there aren’t good ideas or interesting people on “the hellsite,” because there are; in fact, most of them were better at arguing and at making memes than I was, and I felt humiliated that I couldn’t keep up. But Twitter is a place where you go for endless dialectics. King Solomon said that iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another; but on Twitter only iron can withstand the iron of the other users, and too much sharpening at too high heat wears a tool, never mind a person, down to uselessness. I was never iron to begin with, and so I became competitive by reducing myself to some cruel and grasping and self-satisfied Gollum personality. Its effects are still with me, though staying away from Twitter gives my humanity room to breathe again.

Twitter is not a political place, in the ancient sense of the word. It is not a Forum where people go to sort out their common good; it’s not even an Areopagus where ideas are facilely argued and ultimately don’t matter, as classical liberals wish for. Twitter is the coliseum, where the winner is always a beast spattered with his enemies’ blood. It incentivizes competition, vicious jokes and tearing-down, and when someone attempts to have a real argument you know immediately that they came from “offline.” It’s a race to the bottom as depraved as the capitalist marketplace that Twitter’s endemic communists deplore. It is, in short, another tiresome manifestation of the logic of the world and the flesh, which esteems things for giving tangible pleasure, and rejects them as they do not. The tyranny of taste, of coolness, is thus inseparable from Twitter and this logic, and this tyranny is a one-way ratchet which only holiness can break.

This is why I ultimately identify with the people of holy and evangelical intent, who dress up their message as the Catholic Jedi Academy and U.S. Grace Force. Like the invading Israelites they storm the chic-worshipping, restless, iniquitous Internet, drive out its Canaanites, and colonize it with the offline mentality: a heroic combination of bad taste and unbending personal sanctity. That combination has always shaped popular piety, and the populum can’t help it if the tropes presented to them are Star Wars and the macho Stars and Stripes that razed Iraq. Instead they take and sacramentalize even this tasteless cultural matter, making it a conduit of grace which those who love aesthetics more than God will not approach. Moreover improving on existent American virtues has a longer and more praiseworthy history than does tearing it down — Pope Leo XIII, after all, is a declared saint — and it leaves one more open to the peace of the Holy Spirit.

There still exists the danger, either accidental or structural, of pouring old wine into new wineskins: of filling Catholic forms with un-Catholic cultural content, rather than emptying the old forms and filling them with Catholic content. When their makers commit these errors, they shouldn’t be let off the hook or excused just because they’re not members of the cultural elite. But the Catholic Jedi Academy and the U.S. Grace Force and similar websites, pamphlets, decorations and celebrations are, in the words of Pope Saint John Paul II, “a true treasure of the People of God” because of their graceful efficacy and freedom from aesthetic tyranny. They vindicate that wily Apostle, who warned the Corinthians that “God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.”

“Birthright” by James Blood Ulmer – Review

Is there such a thing as the gawdy sublime?     – Matthew Walther

Within this record sits, contentedly, pleasantly, ignorantly, an aggravating contrast. I don’t think it’s a paradox because the values involved don’t contradict each other, they just sit strangely together. James Blood doesn’t have to be an intellectual, but you’d think you could ask of him some decent pop songwriting, or even song choice. Instead we get verses like

I can’t take it no more

I’m afraid you’ll take my soul

Wrap it up in a paper bag

And give it away as a drag

in “I Can’t Take It No More,” and in the song before his stated intention to become a preacher, build his own church and… play guitar. I’ll concede, the folk-rock format rewards and inspires religious banality, and it’s not Christianity’s fault that generations of half-heathen artistic modernists have chosen to suck from the side vein of its aesthetics without ever reaching for the teaching in the carotid. But Blood’s grasp of religion (not to mention race relations and love) is so shabby compared to James Joyce’s, or even that of Mark Lanegan, that his leaden lines inspire me with the horror of offended taste rather than the disgust I usually reserve for banalized, aestheticized belief. The riffs, too, are painfully simple, mostly tonic-dominant-subdominant power chords and even hard-rock minor thirds. And two Willie Dixon songs show us exactly how deep his blues roots are.

This isn’t his age coming to bite him either, his “blues” concepts were this bad on that Odyssey album everybody loves so much. (I think he got them from Jimi Hendrix.) Only one track from Birthright is currently on YouTube, album caboose “Devil’s Got to Burn,” and if it had been any other selection I might not have bought the CD a few months later at the Sandy Blvd. Everyday Music in Portland. “Devil’s Got to Burn” has some of the best harmonies of any song on the record (what are those chords after the chorus?) and it even has competent, well-placed lyrics which work within complex chord changes instead of running flat-footed over simple ones. In fewer words, “Devil’s Got to Burn” works as a post-Beatles rock song where some of the other tracks fail as Tin Pan, blues, folk fluff.

Of course, the reason people like me listen to that blues and folk fluff even a hundred years after it was recorded is not the songwriting, but the performance. James Blood’s strongest suit was never composition, or taste: it was his guitar playing, and that has not decayed. Even Birthright‘s fluff arouses interest, between its minor thirds and fourths, with the kind of guitar licks you might expect from some self-taught forgotten blues coot. His choppy rhythms leap and shudder even more than usual without accountability to backing musicians, and the harmonies answer to no one. The two harmolodic instrumentals are very, very interesting; the chords he chooses to open “White Man’s Jail” made me yelp like a Mexican at a mariachi show; “Geechee Joe” is a fun blues-pop song waiting for a cover; and I already tried to open up “Devil’s Got to Burn.”

The instrumental excellence of this record leaves me wondering if I should really object so much to the banality of its forms, because they don’t stop me from enjoying it and on examination they aren’t really that bad. I would have to be a real jerk to harp on the contradiction between Blood’s highly original playing and clichéd ideas. It doesn’t bother him; why should it bother me? So in the end I shall ignore the shortcomings and endorse Birthright, as all the publications have, as a very good performance by an artist worth watching if only to catch his moments of inspiration.

“Sweet Oblivion Tastes Like Peaches” by Zack Freitas – Review

Looks like Zack took my advice about cutting down from the fourteen tracks of Desolation Animals, because his new record only has five. It’s a little under twenty minutes long and he’s preparing to release the last unreleased single on Bandcamp; I bought a CD from him last December, which is my reference for this review. The first song “8-Track” has has been engineered to have the big dreamy Beach House sound, with lots of reverb on the trebly synths and huge spare drums, except that as a song it’s way better than anything on Depression Cherry, the only Beach House music I’ve listened to. I realized after a few plays-through that it sounds a lot like a Sgt. Pepper song, with rhythmic shifts between mid-tempo rock and the grinding-organ rhythm of the pre-chorus, and I think he’s been returning to the Beatles because he showed me a demo of a song titled “Mary Magdalene” with very Beatley vocal harmonies. The mix is a little more crowded, top- and bottom-heavy with frequencies than that of most “indie” “rock” I hear nowadays.

In fact classic sixties pop seems to be the main influence on this record, which pleases me enormously. I love how the early Stones are echoed in the clomp of “Say Hello,” and how the doubled (tripled? I can’t tell) guitars play counter-melodic riffs in “Tastes Like Peaches” just like Phil Spector might’ve done. I can get all the way behind this particular retro-ism, in which Zack cuts his style with the charmingly stiff forms of old chamber pop.

The harmonic vocabulary on many songs is all Zack — the seventh and sixth chords, the sharpened fourths and flatted sixths, the descending half-steps, yadda yadda. But some of the simple melodies don’t track exactly with that vocabulary — the stirring verses of “Say Hello” seem ever so slightly out of step with the chord progressions (the chorus is good, the bridge superb). A similar condition afflicts “Sweet Oblivion,” and while I really like the tunes of both songs they seem to clash ever so slightly with the relatively complex harmonies. (Of course this criticism is relative to the rest of the EP — both are still quality songs, and catchy.) Over time my favorite tracks have become “8-Track,” “Sunny Day” and “Tastes Like Peaches,” which have the simplest musical backing, because I appreciate what that simplicity enables: a more densely arranged musical setting, where Zack lets the track speak for itself and sings as part of the presentation. Compare: the forty seconds of droney ephemera at the beginning of “8-Track” aren’t very interesting, and probably seven or eight seconds would have served the same purpose; meanwhile, the distorted guitar that makes itself heard near the end of “Tastes Like Peaches” sounds like experimentation within the pop context, and it spices up the track by playing its weirdness against the predictability and formality of the other elements. “Tastes Like Peaches” and “8 Track” aren’t lunging for harmonic innovations without 和 (or graceful ease), and so they sound mature, they don’t trip over themselves.

The lyrical clichés are actually winning me over, and I’m easing into them like a well-worn sweatshirt. (He uses the “down the rabbit hole” trope again! In the first single! The audacity!) Maybe it’s just part of Zack’s style to sing them, but I wish the folk sayings communicated more folk knowledge. I recommend that he get a book of “wandering verses” and listen to the blues and country artists of the early twentieth century (John Hurt, Dave Macon, Skip James) to learn how to better deploy clichés.

He also hired a real L.A. backing band, made up of once-famous Nineties rockers: Pearl Jam’s first drummer Dave Krusen, guitar players from Puddle of Mudd (Matt Fuller) and Skillet (Kevin Haaland), and bassist Adam Kury, who played on Candlebox’s post-“Far Behind” albums. Not sure who backing vocalist Flora Winkler or the three “assistants” are, but I’m sure they contributed too.

P.S. I listened to Blow Off the Steam again and it’s better than I remember. Same with the folky songs on Desolation Animals. But I like this new turn in Zack’s music towards “tracks” and taking full advantage of the recording process, and I hope we hear more of it on the new album.

“The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death” by John Fahey – Review

At the beginning of my first year of college I bought Transfiguration online, listened to it a couple times and put it away. I couldn’t hear any tunes and I was routed by the prospect of fifteen instrumental tracks of acoustic blues, which I didn’t really enjoy at the time. When the school year ended I pulled it out again and found that I liked the first four or five pieces. “Orinda Moraga” was the first to open up, then “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean”; and I took a new pleasure in the convicted slide playing of “I Am the Resurrection.” From there I grew fond of the first side, refusing on principle to skip any tracks (even “Beautiful Linda Getchell,” which I now like) and dug slowly into side two.

My initial intense love (for awhile I called it my second-favorite album, after Tribute to Jack Johnson) for The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death has worn off by now, and I feel ready to evaluate it a little more critically. I dislike the proximity of “How Green Was My Valley” to the nearly identical “The Death of the Clayton Peacock,” although the former is the better song and the latter really does remind me of the peacocks that wandered around the RV park where I worked and listened to the CD last summer. (That high-pitched guitar squawk is nothing like the truck-horn call of a real peacock, but together with the soft rhythmic strut of the bass notes it makes for an apt and funny tone poem about them. I appreciate it.) If they were farther apart both would be more enjoyable. I also think the “Old Southern Medley” is too long, and its good parts might have been better as separate tracks. Other than that I find it hard to complain about The Transfiguration.

I wish to note two things. First, a lot of people seem to hear this as a “calm” album like the rest of John Fahey’s earliest recordings, which Bob Christgau dismissed as a “fantasy of sodden deliverance.” The Guardian too ascribes “an almost Buddhic meditativeness” (never mind the lame conversion of an adjective into a noun, and the fact that Fahey was a professed Christian who got briefly into Hinduism) to The Transfiguration and lumps him in with the “new age” musicians of the Nineties. Having heard his highly abstract 1997 CD City of Refuge I can see where both are coming from, though he ended his career sounding more like Jim O’Rourke and the Sonic Youth than like anything from Windham Hill. But I’ve kind of come to agree with Christgau about The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, which on the whole is for sentimental soaking-in, like an old Disney cartoon, rather than rigorous secular meditation. Where the old blues guys like John Hurt or Elizabeth Cotten made music in response to their environments, John Fahey pulls like a nineteenth-century classical composer from the themes and tropes of old blues to make music reminiscent of the past. I give Christgau credit for understanding this,* and for elevating the explicit Dixieland jazz of Rivers and Religion and After the Ball above the early stuff, even though I don’t really love those records.

Which brings me to my second point: water never rises above its source, and the John Faheys of the world rarely surpass the bluesmen who influence them. I remember reading (I think it was in Lampedusa’s The Leopard) some passage about shreds of themes from bloated symphonies being the only parts that last, and I think that the ponderous modernist Transfiguration will meet the same fate. If you don’t believe me, listen to Canned Heat or Kaleidoscope (the American band) or any other record-collector artist from the Sixties. John Fahey was one of them, trawling thrift shops for 78’s and stealing tunes and picking patterns and whole songs, and he thought like one of them. But even though they loved the music those collector guys lived in a whole nother world not only from the blues people they copied, but also from the kids of their day, and whether or not they liked it they were in love with a tradition that had become totally irrelevant to the times. Yes, a lot of them recorded great rock covers of the old songs — I made a playlist of those for the 11/29/18 episode of my radio show. I love the rock and roll they made out of old blues, and maybe you do too. But do you have any acquaintances who do? (I mean, if you do I envy you.) The artists who “made it” in the Sixties either weren’t collector bands or they cleaved to/defined the loud, rhythmic, rootless new rock paradigm successfully. Beefheart, Hendrix and the Stones come to mind as dedicated blues fans who made the shift and made even better music than their heroes. John Fahey didn’t go rock until the Nineties, after he was located by his fans in my own college town of Salem, OR.** Even in his life habits he was a creature of the blues, never of rock music, and he would never beat or even equal his friends John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten at that game. Like all modernists, up to and including Bob Dylan, he’s a nineteenth-century sensibility marooned in the twentieth.

*However, I feel there’s more to City of Refuge that I don’t yet understand, and I wonder if Christgau’s ear isn’t still so coarse that he couldn’t appreciate it for the same reason.

**When I learned about the re-discovery of John Fahey in an Oregon homeless shelter, I laughed out loud for two minutes because it perfectly paralleled how he yanked Bukka White and Skip James out of retirement in the Sixties. Kinda mean of me but then again, he literally found James in a hospital bed and persuaded him to go on tour.