“…the reverse may be true” by Disen Gage – Review

Three Russian albums figure prominently in my music collection. The first I found was Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra’s version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. While I have not listened to many other recordings of that famous piece, I can say without reservation that the Gergiev version rises head and shoulders above the ones I have, stupendously portraying what Stravinsky himself called the “earth cracking open and groaning.” The second, Air Canda, is the self-nominative debut of a jazzy progressive-rock band with a strong dedication to the brainy avant-garde but also to the propositions of rock and funk. They are the reason I took notice of R.A.I.G. Records, the label on which Disen Gage were also based for awhile.

This album, as you may have guessed by now, is the third. It was my second R.A.I.G. purchase. I was drawn in by its cover art, with the birdcage-headed man and all; it was supposed to be trippy, but was just absurd enough to get a chuckle out of a cultured listener. After all, that’s what I was. *Elicits a bored “pffft” from the crowd*

Since I was browsing the catalog on Bandcamp, I was able to listen to the music beforehand. I focused my beams on the first two pieces, “What’s Up on Planet Plyuk?” and “Landing (including “Mamushka”),” and attempted entry.

Disclaimer: “Planet Plyuk” is a track to avoid for anyone who dislikes the polka. Its hilarious intro includes the sound of water moving through pipes behind a cheap plywood wall, as though the listener were crammed into some European-size apartment. The music begins. The reverb is cold and relatively narrow, but spacious on the top, cloudy but not gloomy. It is morning music for Western Russia, the soundtrack over which one wakes up and asks: “Shit, what am I going to do today?”

As the song develops, the nerdy little lead guitar (this is, after all, a band of biochemistry Ph.D.’s) takes charge and speaks with more eloquence, repeating himself for effect occasionally and suddenly, with the band’s entry, drops into a lower register to address us in friendly song. The band behind him is hard-hitting and swaggers through — hey, that’s a rock beat behind our friend, and a horn section. What kind of goofy crap is this? I came for the oompah, and I leave with a parade march.

Give the bass a few measures to himself, as he boinks along in 5/4 with some lowercase electronic beeps and boops, and then the rest of the instruments take over the song again. Suddenly it’s a fast 4/4 gunslinger, with the original guitar right out in front of the hollow trebly drums, the bass pining beneath it; the guitar cries a few more notes from the original theme, before the tape loops backwards in the machine for two bars and the guitar drops back in again without missing a beat; he exits and the song’s brakes kick in soon enough. As the band finally drops out, the plumbing noise returns momentarily, only to exit as well with a grand spacious whoosh. A building wave of cymbals crests over the next song, and a series of dissonant major thirds introduces “Landing.”

There is very little else one can say about “Landing,” except that it’s a crying shame that it includes no spy-chase music video. It starts with laid-back intrigue, rises to an insistent thrust; adopts a secretive industrial tone, returns to spy music; erupts into hideous metallic laughter, and swings back and forth like a maniac to the screams of synthesized horns; has a moment of clarity and beauty; returns to brilliant mechanized instability. Another piece of quietude attempts to clarify the situation — this must be the nightclub scene. Instead it only makes things foggier and more incomprehensible. The pursuer steps outside to clear his head, sees his target. Their pulses rise in unison, until the one is chasing the other through the streets of Berlin or Moscow or some such sophisticated city, stealing mopeds left and right, flailing desperately through the eight-inch avenues, crossing thousand-year-old bridges, but each equally matched (the music changes chords slightly to indicate whose point of view is whose) until the triumphant hero comes close, and then I guess both find a tank to drive like in that Pierce Brosnan-as-James Bond movie. All hell breaks loose to the pounding doop-chick beat, with little interludes for the band members to shout “Mamushka” at increasing volumes, trading fours with their own instruments to heighten the manic-schizophrenic minisym. Then a tragic denouement, ending the song on a minor chord when a major should have triumphed — the bad guy wins, I guess. Shit happens.

Next is “Lehaim to N.E.P.” I used to think that it was a tribute to some kind of futuristic train route, like “Trans-Europe Express,” but I googled “Lehaim” and “N.E.P.” separately and learned that the former is a Jewish blessing (along the lines of “to life” or “long live X”) and the latter the acronym for Lenin’s pro-capitalistic New Economic Plan. In other words, the title actually means “long live pro-capitalistic Soviet policy.” Go figure. The song itself is as nonsensical as its title, bursting into flowering trumpet solos and snaking along the most dumb-hilarious melodic lines this side of Frank Zappa. A couple of guitar solos serve to raise the song’s profile more than a little. It ends on exactly the wrong chord after an irregular number of bars, just to mess with us.

“Exyrinx” begins with a solemn solo guitar lead, issued from high on a windswept ridge in the steppes of the barren East. Bass and drums work in tandem, pursuing mind-bending goofy textures in the pursuit of  irony. Over this does the guitar progress, dropping into its cavernous low register and appearing in the right speaker and the high and low center of the aural space. It grows more distinct and trebly over time, as electronic whicks and whocks build in the background (god, this producer is brilliant) until the bass adopts a different rhythm and guitar 2 enters; a short, anxious new theme enters and drops out again in favor of the old jam, but returns and moves forward (jumping out occasionally to a new piece) and perverting the original beat once more before returning to the height of tension, a paranoid guitar wailing in the foreground and balling up again before the release of a flood of tension and the return to a more insistent variation on the original lead. The bass and drums repeat their earlier loop and a gentle tremulous organ washes the surrounding soundscape clean, like a mother and her bubble-bath soap. The guitar becomes sentimental once again and winds the piece down again to a crackling lo-fie background.

“To Kill Kenny” is not the best track here, but leaves no doubts about the band’s love of arpeggios. I do not complain — I love innovative ones myself, and when the rhythmic guitar on the left begins to interact with the right it becomes pure bliss. The song adopts a pleading tone partway through, but leads eventually to a speedening crescendo and several key changes to ultimately… sort of… pass away. The last chord in the song is major when it should be minor. (I already used the term “Picardy third” in my Jack Johnson review, so I will demur here.)

Say, isn’t that Les Claypool? “The Parovoz Hitchhikers to Japan” (if you can’t tell, the concept is related to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which I absolutely adore) begins with a slap-bass riff, and the guitar moves in predatorily to play some surprisingly pentatonic licks: key one, semitone higher, octave jump, octave and semitone, before reverting and skipping back down the neck with this epic flourish (hear and believe!) before rolling under again and then returning to the original riff. The epic lick is repeated, and the return to subtlety; then another factory-made quasi-rhythmic clang, until crowds of people materialize in the background, and steel drums — of all the hilariously tasteless instruments to insert — play a brief solo. A halting boink grows in intensity until a guitar screams behind it, begging the audience for reprieve before it finally goes the “artistic” route and commits suicide, and a blistering return from the first motif only once, before the song fades out on a single synthesizer chord.

This was originally my favorite track.

“God Saw Otherwise,” if I may appropriate mental-health imagery for a second, begins with a bad case of Tourette’s Syndrome, interrupting its timid guitar lines with explosive bassy thumps every few measures. Each chorus (the structure is almost conventional, when compared to the likes of “Landing” and “Exyrinx”) lets loose with heavyweight thuds, and a decent enough bridge makes it a good song, if not epic. It passes out in about three minutes from lack of oxygen.

“Laxatives Are Included” constitutes a return to form, however. A sluggish bassline introduces the song, until the guitar and drums give it a sense of more regimented laziness: a drowsy platoon on parade. Throughout, a Blixa Bargeld-ish sheen of slide feedback shimmers and squiggles comically. The song dunders along quite hilariously for a few minutes, until it goes back to straight 4/4 and begins a devious series of variations on the original theme; the song, ridden with anxiety, picks up the the pace gradually, reaches a reverbed climax, then reverts to a momentary attempt to find the fret the guitarists were playing earlier. The original theme is stated, and the bass slides into the midrange to give us the final note. The shiny ambient Blixa guitar fades.

We then get “Ikar’s Guide to the Galaxy.” (Get it? Like “Hiker’s,” but different? We’re so funny, Disen Gage and I.) This is the other “epic” song present. The opening motif reminds me a lot of Irish music, with the pentatonic jig and all that, but the band is never less than eager to jerk you around, and quickly winds things down into palm-muted territory, where under the guitars we can hear a synthesizer and somebody making cute mouth noises. The speaker begins to shout “Lyuli-Potzelui” (apparently means “gypsy kisses” in Uzbek or something) in a ridiculous falsetto. They will do it again. A few more bars, and then a short burst of incendiary ’80’s metal guitar, then a muted vibraphone solo. Seriously.

More mechanical beats and atonal guitar abuse. These chugging riffs raise the stakes until we’re at an entirely new level, and then the breaks begins: cracks in the foundation, band members screaming the words from the song’s title (which appears to mean “gypsy kisses,” but I don’t speak Uzbek so it’s uncertain) for a few bars, trading off with the guitars like in “Landing” until the song just… disappears. In its place is a French voice and some cool-jazzy bass ambience, which is replaced soon enough by a spacious, melodramatic piece that could have come from a 20th-century symphony or a semi-lame jazz fusion album. Not that it’s bad — just a little over-the-top. Kind of like the rest of the album. But hey, it comes with the territory when you’re the best ironic prog band in Russia.

A couple of peeping sounds introduce “How Much Is Oxygen On Planet Khanud?” and a bassline follows them. It swings along for a couple of minutes, but eventually slides into that big, dramatic atmosphere from the end of the previous song. This one is a bit more fleshed out, and features what sounds almost like a bass solo with both noisy and wahed guitars; the first motif, now absent the swing, plays once more. The tempo picks up, doing that half-step-at-a-time I love so much in Guru Guru and jazzy music, but unfortunately the piece dissipates in time and the album comes to a regrettable end. A man shouts in Russian as the peeps come back and the toilet sound from track 1 is reprised, and that’s the end of …the reverse may be true.

A final note (DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE HEARD THE RECORDING): according to the Bandcamp liner notes, the album was recorded solely with the use of guitars and effects pedals. That means all the instruments you heard — brass section, trumpet, steel drums, harmonium, peep-whistle (whatever played the intro to “Planet Khanud”), vibes, synthesizer, flute, calliope, theremin and anything else I missed — are special effects played on some dude’s guitar. Each solo, it seems, was played in the style of the instrument it emulated, and quite well done too. I think it might be Sergei Bagin who brings these pedals to the table — they aren’t in evidence on The Screw-Loose Entertainment, the album recorded before he joined the band, but they are definitely in the fabric of its descendant Libertage. You’ve probably stopped reading by now, so let me reiterate:

DISEN GAGE = GOOD. REVERSE IS BEST DISEN GAGE ALBUM. GO NOW. TUNE IN.

My opinion of this album continues to rise.

“A Tribute to Jack Johnson” by Miles Davis – Review

Today I listened to this album in the car with my recording-arts mentor. As we drove back from his studio in Morgan Hill, CA I remembered that the last time I had played a CD in his car it was the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On the Dime. I was amused briefly to realize the near total opposition of the two: the Minutemen album was seventy-five minutes long, filled to the absolute brim with forty-three little M-80 blasts, each about ninety seconds in length; Davis’ was a single record which staggered under the weight of two slablike tracks, each between twenty-five and twenty-seven minutes long. Double Nickels was composed of funk-rock that attempted to pass as jazz; Jack Johnson was a summit of jazz and fusion masters who had come together to play funk and rock and roll. I grow away from the former and towards the latter.

I don’t like Bitches Brew either. I listened to that rotten soup of good intentions for a year without making any headway, and the only track I ever enjoyed in part was “Pharaoh’s Dance.” Ultimately I have shelved it; perhaps I will return. Probably not. (My insincere apologies to Greg Tate, who wrote so lovingly of the Bad Brains: I like some of what you like. Other stuff, not really.)

Anyway, the backing band for this earth scorcher is one of the first reasons I saw fit to invest in it. John McLaughlin, perhaps my personal favorite guitarist, gets chances aplenty to scream over “Right Off” in his eminently air-guitar-worthy Mahavishnu style, but in “Yesternow” he exercises a subtlety surprising for the author of such schmaltz as “A Lotus On Irish Streams” (and pretty much all of the Orchestra’s later work). It appears that he has discovered the wah-wah and distortion pedals under a loose cobblestone at an Indian temple and resolved to let everyone else know they exist. The album begins with one of his power-chord flourishes in stumbling 4/4, before drummer Billy Cobham irons out the bunched-up rhythm with a swingin’ rock beat. (Side note: Cobham also drummed for the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and his duet with John McLaughlin in the intro to “The Noonward Race” is a sound to behold. In terms of sheer technique he may actually exceed Neil Peart, and in dynamic sensibility [and not being a libertarian asshole] he far exceeds Rush’s drummer. Give’m a hand, folks.) McLaughlin rips the next two minutes apart into a series of scowling guitar runs; these segue obliquely into a key change (from E to Bb pentatonic) which appears to catch the bassist by surprise. (Bassist Michael Henderson performs admirably throughout, though he gets the usual rock-bassist shaft because of his secondary role to the lead instruments. His basslines are highly constant, however, and do not disappoint when scored against the bass’s true benchmark: maintenance of the groove, the ass-shaking chest-thrusting foot-tapping groove. One revels in the drummer’s antics, pantomiming and praising; when the bassist takes control, however, it’s like Victor Wooten’s imaginary mentor says in The Music Lesson: “They’re really cheering for you.”

About here, the man who was supposed to be on the album cover enters in. (On the original release, Davis’ trumpeting profile against a black background was exchanged for a stylized painting of the titular boxer. The printers also spelled Teo Macero’s name wrong. Twice.) Miles plays trumpet in bleating blasts, as he always has. He has McLaughlin to take care of breathless speed-leads and lightning scales, so he focuses on sustained squeals in the upper register, and often harps on one or two notes in rapid succession at Thompson-gun speed. No gunslinging here, though — Miles need not protect his massive reputation. In fact, he only appears on the first side for about eight of its twenty-seven minutes, and for the rest lets his manic sidemen, all about ten or twenty years his junior, turn them jazz cats loose from the bag. This is a badass setup.

After about ten minutes the producer inserts a minute-long segment of Miles’ trumpet playing, accompanied in the left speaker by an earaching electronic loop that is the only downside to headphone listening. Ultimately the break serves the recording well by providing a short reprieve from the relentless rock attack of side 1, which might grow monotonous if left unchecked. No one, however, would call it their favorite part of the album, and one is relieved when “Right Off” resumes. A saxophonist named Steve Grossman makes a series of reedy, nerdy soprano runs which use too many notes but make their point well enough. He plays for several minutes and says a great many florid things, perhaps oversharing; in any case he performs well. I can’t help wishing, however, that we’d gotten another Wayne Shorter solo in a Miles band; had Wayne been there to turn brass into gold, there’s no telling how brilliantly copies of this album would have glowed yellow on record-store shelves. Anyway, after Grossman’s session flashes the keyboard of the famed Herbie Hancock, whose Headhunters solo album yielded my enthusiastic approval (I actually put a band together to play “Chameleon” for a school talent show). Hancock’s fascination with cheesy synthesizers is still several years distant, and he is instead given a “Louie Louie” organ with which to make a serious point about the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Fortunately he ignores the festival owners’ orders and lays down a damned fine solo.

After Herbie, however, the very texture of the music changes. Cobham suddenly begins to whack away at another 4/4 beat, the same from the album’s beginning, which McLaughlin accompanies with a bizarre 12-bar guitar lick. Apparently some bands have recycled the riff as the “Theme from Jack Johnson,” none of whom I can find on the Internet. The songs I can find which are titled “Theme from Jack Johnson” do not actually include the 12-bar lick in their interpretations of Davis songs, instead riffing on the intro/outro of “Right Off” and the primary bassline in “Yesternow.” Can’t say I blame them, as those motifs are far more interesting.

Luckily, the “Theme” ends pretty quickly and, holy of holies, the band actually returns to the introduction in E pentatonic. (I mean no offense to schmaltzians, but E is a way better key than Bb.) This outro is the highlight of the entire album. It defies words, except that

the head shakes from left to right to up and down and in all directions, hair and wonderment splattering the walls with Pollockian patterns of wonder and blunt socket extatic yes indeed it is in fact Herbie Hancock getting a shot at the organ manipulative pedals and hand pusher syndromic cyclopic virgin buttons of bliss swirling howl undue trapezoidal microcosms reverbrating more and more unto detailed bliss

during the organ solo. Afterwards Grossman embarks on a far more interesting solo, and John McLaughlin reminds us that he’s here, and he’s fucking mad. If the song were asphalt it would not play on a turntable, but for the sake of argument if the song were asphalt McLaughlin is an airplane that crashes onto it in bloody burst of fire and screeching metal. There is no way to end the song but on a fade-out, because a jam like “Right Off” goes on into infinity. Like Finnegan’s Wake, the ideal listener would loop it so that the ending segues softly into the blasting beginning. Fortunately, I get a little spent after twenty-seven swingin’ minutes of Miles Davis boogie rock, so I allow the second track to happen.

Side 2, “Yesternow,” is where most critics like Bob Christgau and I run out of energy. (He just leaves it at “music for a vacation on the moon.” Lazy bastard writes like four sentences per album. How can he not stand not advocating more for stuff he loves? Good incisive writer, though.) However, it deserves none of the shadow that “Right Off” attempts to cast over it, and stands purty darn strongly as its own twenty-six-minute celebration of funky bliss. Michael Henderson, der bajista barista, lays it down with a single bassline which he repeats endlessly for ten minutes. (The preceding sentence is a shining example of the oxymoron figure of speech.) John McLaughlin is uncharacteristically subdued, stinging softly with wahed-out chordal moans. Steve Grossman makes a short and passing appearance. Herbie plays a few muted organ chords, which space out and eventually die away at the end of the section. Billy Cobham hangs cymbal splashes on the confection like a diamonds on a chandelier, and Miles inserts oddly placed trumpet thingies into the overall stuff. I have officially run out of words. Luckily producer Teo Macero was kind enough to slap another soft interlude, extracted directly from the first few minutes of “Shhh/Peaceful,” into the middle of the half-hour track, giving me new vocabulary and a chance to discuss something that isn’t the first ten minutes of “Yesternow.” I have not mentioned the man often enough in this text, and will do so now: Macero is responsible for the bizarre shifts in tone and motif throughout Miles’ Sixties and Seventies work. He was a big fan of that tape-splicing technique which self-loving (read: wanking) “progressive” and psychedelic rock bands adopted to extend their songs to unsustainable lengths; Macero, however, was good at it. Get me not wrong — his product on Bitches Brew was not very interesting, but the sessions themselves were sow’s ears, and he couldn’t have made a whole lot of good of them. Instead, he got to hone his skills on that disappointing album, and developed new ways of interpolating and connecting song parts in time for Jack Johnson. It was he who managed to splice the straight-4/4 “Theme” into the swinging “Right Off,” and here takes four parts (the interlude, and three takes of “Willie Nelson” which comprise the parts of the song) and links them together in a similarly terrific fashion. Once the interlude ends we see that a second guitarist has joined the band: a guy named Sonny Sharrock, who plays a bleeping, blooping axe in the right channel. I have only ever heard one guitar like that: Blixa Bargeld of the Bad Seeds (and Einstazander Newbarton or whatever it is — I’ve never listened to it). Now I’ve heard two. It squeals and blubs throughout, playing as if through an amplifier recovered in that Antikythera shipwreck, watery and fluid and operates on an utterly alien premise which people only started aping years later. Meanwhile, McLaughlin plays his pentatonic licks in the left speaker, and before you know it he leaves a single measure of feedback echoing therein before embarking on a new lockstep pattern with Henderson; Sharrock continues his rude  futurism. Miles appears here and there to play his characteristic extended notes. We haven’t seen a group leader this absent since moderator Lester Holt during the second presidential debate of 2016. (ZINGER!)

Once the extended jam dies away, however, an entirely mood overtakes the piece. Heart-rending funeral brass bleat a sad march as Teo resurrects the trumpet solo from “Right Off,” and unexpected mysterious bittersweetness predominates for the last two minutes; the chords are sad and stately, the muted echoing trumpet devastates the soul, until a voice actor speaks authoritatively: “I’m Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world. I’m black — and they never let me forget it. I’m black, alright — I’ll never let them forget it” — a reminder that the record is a soundtrack, and a salute, to the life of Miles’ favorite boxer.

The album ends on a Picardy third — a major chord when a one expects a minor. It’s a common form of resolution and indicates small but resolute hope.