Consonant (Fenway)

This Consonant album was one of the biggest surprises of 2002 for me, surfacing as a new Clint Conley-penned album of rock songs which was magic to those of us who worship at the altar of Burma. Nineteen years is a long time to hide away, and expectations were understandably low. The band had a guy from Bedhead and a guy from Come, but how good could the songs be? I guess if you spend nineteen years writing stuff, you're going to have twelve good tunes for a CD. But nothing could quite prepare me for how good this actually was. Or IS - because it still sounds absolutely great, a perfect merger of classic rock, 80's and 90's American guitar indie and a bit of the Burma fire. It's all love songs, of course, or rather contemplations of love and loss structured somewhat around these weird acrostic poems by Holly Anderson. There's bitterness seeping out of tunes like 'Call it L---' and 'Who Touches You Now?', but it's the more lunar language that kills me - a hopeless 40something romantic who is struggling to put things into context. Anderson's poems are built around the names of flowers and Conley has certainly adapted them well into rock phrasing, managing to sing lines like 'Cured but curious we embrace post-pathetic happiness: neutered, fixed, companionable' without it sounding as strange as it probably just did to read it. The fuzzy guitars, drum fills and amped-up energy ('Buckets of Flowers, Porno Mags'; 'That Boston Life') are raging with confidence and mastery; for an aging punk, there's no element of embarrassment. Chris Brokaw's guitars find the right places - for those of us who grew up with music that itself grew up on Burma, it's all just perfect. There's oodles of 'Trem Two' style moodiness, but still a hint of 'That's How I Escaped my Certain Fate'. And Roger Miller turns up a few times too. The pop hooks are there - not singsong like the Beatles but subtle, mind-burrowing lyrical fragments that I had bouncing around in my head for much of 2002. I remember having the 'We couldn't ever make enough / time for lips and hips and arms' following around my consciousness for so long that I was starting to go nuts; of course, for a song about the ghost of a relationship (and the song I refer to is the closing tune 'What a Body Could Do'), it's practically supernatural. 'Post-Pathetic' is an absolutely brilliant song, with a bit of college 80s jangle, sharp sharp sharp words, and a self-deprecating sexuality that gets better with every listen. It's the influencer meeting his influencees, and I was pretty much obsessed with this CD when it came out - my digipak is dinged and dented from taking it to work every day. Of course, I haven't played it for a few years which is why it feels so good and familiar now - I actually am on the third consecutive listen. Rock music connects when it's music and lyrics meeting in perfect balance, and that's what's here. I love lines like 'Wasn't she full of wild want / for is he and her she?' but even more when the band is providing the perfect presentation of it. My love for Consonant is pretty strong, and I realise a bit idiosyncratic, but just wait, cause there's gonna be lots of these as we go along.

The Coctails (Carrot Top)

This is the final CD by the Coctails, the cover photo emulating their previous album Peel, only with a feeling of rot and decay here. This is an album that I hold close to my heart - an idiosyncratic, personal favourite that becomes more obscure with each passing year, but that I still feel a strong rapport with. Because I don't own anything else by this band, this is taken a bit out of context. The Coctails were a Chicago band in the early 90s who merged indie rock with eclectic instrumentation and jazz/lounge influence; their earlier LPs, such as Long Sound, were bouncy and owed a debt to Dave Brubeck and stuff like that. Peel took things into a somewhat more guitar-based territory, and then this masterpiece ends up almost totally eschewing the quirks of their early work (with the closest reference being 'Cadali', a jaunty tune that is lovely, but out of place here). The Coctails is a dour, depressed record that's about half-instrumental, half-vocal. There are bright spots - 'Circles' is a major-key instrumental with vibraphones and a really perfect, brief use of casio beats - but even this has a somber tone. The vocal tracks are set by the opening cut, 'When I Come Around' (released around the same time as the Green Day hit of the same name); your typical white-guy indierock vocalist, emoting despite not actually having a great singing voice. This is heard more clearly on 'So Low', where the singer (either Archer Prewitt, John Upturch or Barry Phipps; not really sure) bellows a dramatic dirge. I can't speak highly enough of how wonderful this record is, but I have been listening to it for almost 15 years. The credits reveal the source recordings to come from various points throughout the 90s - 'When I Come Around' and 'Never Knew' were actually recorded with Stuart Moxham back in 1993 (this album was released in '96). So rather than being a cohesive statement of melancholy, this was a collection of what didn't fit on the other records; whatever the motive, it ends up being the most rewarding work of their career (and I think it outclasses anything Prewitt did subsequently in the Sea and Cake or solo). This is guitar-based indie rock, with carefully chosen notes that ring out delicately like a Bedhead record. And like Bedhead's last album, there's one fuzzy stomper near the end of the record that would be out of place except it fits so perfectly - the grunge anthem 'Cast Stones', a snarled rant that feels more frustrated than angry. The Coctails is filled with moments of utter beauty, such as the delicate 'Starling' and the epic 'City Sun'; it closes with a Terry Riley moment, 'Last Organ'. It's a thick, elliptical organ drone, clearly intended as an elegy for the band who I think had broken up by the time this was released. At the time, I'm sure this album complemented the livelier tunes on their other records - completing the picture, and fleshing out the band into a more fully expressive unit. But since it's been at least a decade or more since I've heard even Peel, I'm left remembering the Coctails by this, their Sister Lovers.