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[Cellars]

Satellites of love
New transmissions from Medea Connection and Cave In

BY CARLY CARIOLI

It’s your typical girl-meets-boy story. Y’know, daughter of new-age-bookstore owner meets recovering prog-rock geek in a class on existentialism: they hit it off and form a beguiling art-metal guitar-drums duo, a band devoted to cosmic-minded particle acceleration grounded in punk rock and Greek mythology whose uncategorizable output is equally indebted to Black Sabbath, New Order, and Procol Harum. Of course they fall madly in love, and their albums take on the surreal topography of a hermetically sealed dream universe, a musical vision that adheres to an interior logic all its own. Village Voice metallurgist Chuck Eddy calls ’em "pretentious" and gives a hearty thumbs up. They get married.

Which brings us to The Bell Ringer (Curve of the Earth), the sprawling, 70-odd-minute third album from the Medea Connection, now a trio for the first time on disc with the addition of bassist Steve Farmer. Coming on the heels of 1999’s The Golden Rectangle and 2000’s The Action Noise (both self-released), it’s the work of a group of consummate outsiders, full of towering conceptual leaps and grand thematic flourishes. The sharp goth-pop hooks on the opening three-and-a-half-minute "Through the Fields" and the under-three-minute "Together We Explode" cut to the bone; elsewhere, the extended detours on "Before the Ceremony" and "Serpentine Walls" (clocking in at nine and 12 minutes, respectively) wind through bleak, ponderous, bulbous lunar landscapes. It’s a music that’s at once primitive — the drums pack a compact, four-on-the-floor wallop — and confrontationally expansive.

Pretentious? "Pretentiously engaging," offers singer/guitarist Daniel Brockman, over drinks at the Linwood Grille. His wife (she’s also his drummer and his co-lyricist), Tanya Paglia, says, "We’re not going for a dumb-rock ¾sthetic. It’s insulting that rock would have to be stupid all the time. You do your own thing, and if at times it seems pretentious, then that’s okay."

"I think at least on my end," Brockman explains, "I always saw a connection between pretentious ’70s art rock and punk. I could see a tie between Steve Howe and Greg Ginn’s playing. We want to play aggressive music, but we also want to have, like, Roger Dean artwork and stuff." It figures, then, that Dinosaur Jr were a big influence, though J Mascis was never anywhere near this haunted. "When I was in high school, I was really obsessive about Procol Harum," recalls Brockman. "They were kind of the same thing: they were really poppy, but then they’d have some 20-minute epic about, like, the sea. I thought that was the bee’s knees at the time. Like Robin Trower and Mick Ronson were my big guitar idols in high school.

"When we started out, we were so insular about our ¾sthetic that I don’t think it made sense to anyone else. It was all over the place. For instance, our feeling was, since it was only two of us, we wanted to be both set up at the front of the stage, angled slightly toward each other — so all the energy had to meet about five feet in front of the stage. Not that we expected anyone to get it. I don’t know if we ever thought about what it would look like from the other side. At the same time, Tanya and I were also big Cheap Trick fans, and I don’t think that anyone would’ve gotten that out of us. Like, ‘Obsessed with Time’ on The Golden Rectangle I think we sort of saw as ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ on Heaven Tonight. Like, ‘Around song five there has to be this kind of suicide song.’ But I don’t think too many people would catch that; to us, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course! That’s so Cheap Trick!’ "

Talking about "Mirror Mind," from The Action Noise, Brockman goes on, "I had this idea of writing a song about talking with dead people. It sounds sort of stupid when you talk about it, but when you’re writing a song about it, it can make more sense. The music came about because I was listening to a lot of Oasis at the time." Mind you, "Mirror Mind" is a six-minute Pink Floydian dirge.

"To me," Brockman continues, "it’s all about amplifier worship. I think as a music appreciator in high school, I was very confused about what I wanted. I was never gonna be a metal kid, I was never gonna be a punk kid, I was never gonna be some pop nerd — like, ‘That Randy Newman album he did in ’74 that Lester wrote about is so great.’ When I was in college and I wanted to be in bands real bad but I had no idea what kinda band I wanted to be in, I would think, I just want to play something that is rock music. I wanted to find out what rock music was. And I think maybe the primitivism was trying to find out what rock music is in the first place. And rock music is pretentious and not pretentious at the same time. It’s always about making the most pretentious music you can out of the most blatantly standard set-up. My guitar sound and my songwriting was just an effort to play louder and have confidence in your own primitivism: that can be like your own style. And I can actually write a song in this style that I play, and if I do this enough, it’ll look like it’s on purpose, and soon it’ll be a signature style, instead of, like, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ "

But as I was saying, this is a love story, and The Bell Ringer is also full of love songs: moons-in-June, the whole bit. Except that when Brockman, with his imposing Peter Murphy–like intonation, gets to the part where your Italian waiter bawls, "That’s amore!", he instead spends a couple of verses describing the anatomy of his beloved’s retina, and another verse on the astronomic concept of totality. This being the Medea Connection, they can’t be talking about just another moon. It’s gotta be a total eclipse of the heart.

The last two songs on The Bell Ringer come from an album’s worth of music the duo recorded for their wedding. "Before the Ceremony" is literally that: music to be played just before the ceremony. You wanna know what kind of wedding it was? Their bassist played a gong. "We made the parents march out to this parent-marching song we wrote, and the bridesmaids, too," Paglia recalls.

"And the whole thing has that same Medea Connection drum beat," says Farmer, the gongsman. "Doom, doom, doom, doom."

The bride marched down the aisle to a song they’d written that was inspired, says Brockman, by the Queen score for the scene in Flash Gordon where Max von Sydow’s Ming the Merciless is on the verge of that diabolical wedding with Melody Anderson’s Dale Arden. "What Tanya really liked about it — we listened to it over and over, I went out and bought the soundtrack — was there’s a part halfway through where it becomes very discordant. Because she’s marrying Ming the Merciless, it’s not really supposed to be happening — and Tanya’s like, ‘There! Do that!’ "

"I want the dark tones, because it’s beautiful!" Paglia laughs. "I mean, obviously we’re not dark people, so no one would take the wrong idea about it."

"Immediately after the ‘You may kiss the bride’ part, we did this heavy-metal version of ‘Ode to Joy,’ " says Brockman. "I think that was the part that freaked people out."

"No," laughs Paglia, "they loved it!"

JUST BEFORE SAUNTERING into the studio with Cave In to record the sprawling, neo-prog epic Jupiter (Hydrahead), frontman Stephen Brodsky holed up with Jupiter producer Brian McTernan to record his second solo album — a follow-up to the precociously brilliant home-recorded Expose Your Overdubs (Magic Bullet), but also an album that was intended to be a proper studio debut. The result? A mature, well-thought-out, haunted and intimate effort, his most melodically and emotionally straightforward material to date.

Unfortunately, the solo album Brodsky has just released, OlŽ Sunday (Magic Bullet), is not that album, and in fact Static Intellect, as the studio album was to have been called, may never see the light of day. (Although at one point it was so close to release that a review by yours truly appeared in a nationally distributed glossy magazine.) Instead, OlŽ Sunday is another batch of home recordings completed in the six months or so since Cave In signed to RCA; perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the song whose title is written largest on the album cover is called "Big Deal." There are some decent sketches here and a few live favorites. The disc isn’t as indebted to the heavenly aura and somber patina of Elliott Smith as was Static Intellect, but it can be a bit of a bore. A few of the tunes find Brodsky tickling the same Brookline High School ivories on which he recorded the Moons of Jupiter EP — a fantastic and ambitious transcription of a few Jupiter tunes to solo piano. "Sunday Free" is the most bittersweet song here and the best of the lot, but whereas Expose Your Overdubs seemed to document the energetic blossoming of a new songwriter just discovering his voice, OlŽ simply feels half-finished.

Just before heading to LA to rehearse songs for their forthcoming RCA debut, Cave In tapped Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie (Hole, Radiohead) for a quickie session at Fort Apache; the two songs appearing on their new Hydrahead single — one of two planned released to tide the band’s audience over until the major-label album — aren’t the best of the lot they’ve cooked up in the past six months. I’ve heard them play a couple of new tunes live that have sounded like a some brave new breed of punk-rock anthem, but these aren’t them. The riff on the B-side, "Lift Off," seems to have been lifted off Quicksand’s "Freezing Process." The A-side, "Lost in the Air," strips from their sound the dense magma of Jupiter, leaving a swirling and surging neo-grunge tune somewhere between Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins and the Who. It’s a sign the band are in cocoon mode again — transformations are under way, but it’s too soon to tell what sort of insect will emerge.

Issue Date: December 13 - 20, 2001

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