Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys
Git
(Ghostly/Shinkoyo)
Stravinsky once opined that
Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” is an “absolutely
contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary
forever,” but the problem with such predictions is that time
keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the
future. As soon as we invent a term to distinguish the art of today
and tomorrow from yesterday’s, some attention-starved clown
comes along with a new twist on the formula and obliges us to pile
on the “posts.” It’s never been more difficult to épater le bourgeois, but those crazy kids won’t stop trying.
The deformed but lovable brainchild of Matt
Mehlan, Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys is a more expansive,
improv-based version of Mehlan’s one-man band Skeletons. If Git is any
indication, the new ensemble is as bourgeois-averse as ever, even
though it’s evolved from one dude and his computer to a real
band, complete with punk-rock drummers and classically trained
trombonists. Often the quintet seems willfully obnoxious,
unleashing a punishing scrum of squall and clatter guaranteed to
alienate all those bourgie losers who still demand consonance and
coherence from their aural entertainment. If you ever need to clear
a room or torture an enemy combatant, put on “There’s a
Fly in Your Soup and I Put It There,” a grating chorale of
manipulated voices, molested violins, and digital screeches that
resembles the amplified death throes of small drowning insects.
On the other hand, Git is not all discord all
the time. Worm-eaten pop tropes bob up like driftwood in the
maelstrom; harmonies lurk like freshwater pearls. Like most art in
our post-postmodern culture, Git is a pastiche of existing forms. Sometimes it
sounds like a psychotic collage of Steely Dan, bionic cicadas, and
a drum circle trapped in a video arcade; sometimes it sounds like
an inoffensive jam-band jumble of world beat, no-wave funk, and
prog-rock. Though Mehlan’s lyrics reek of cannabis and condescension (when they don’t sound as if
he made them up on the spot), his offhand falsetto is weirdly
endearing, his melodies improbably hummable. Call it
“avant-pop” or “experimental dance” or
“post-post-rock” — call it what you want, as long as
you realize that the people of 2184 are no more likely to hear a track
from Git in
their space-age transport pods than we are to hear “Grosse
Fuge” in our elevators today. We might not know what the future
will sound like, but people are fairly predictable.
Petracovich
We Are Wyoming
(Red Buttons)
Petracovich’s
second album, We Are Wyoming, is a beguiling blend of classic pop, indie rock,
and trip-hop, replete with lilting melodies, layered laptops, and
plump piano hooks. If it shares the same fate as its predecessor,
the equally lovely Blue Cotton Skin, Wyoming won’t get anywhere near the ink that it
deserves. It’s too bad because, between the bloody quagmire
of Iraq and the toxic wasteland of New Orleans, things are looking
pretty ugly right now, and Petracovich’s music is an
excellent way to drown out the din of lying politicians and
blame-shifting pundits. Fronted by Jessica Peters, who writes,
sings, programs, and plays keyboards on all the songs, Petracovich
is named for Peters’ great-grandfather but might as well be
Russian slang for “pretty.” Relentlessly, remorselessly
pretty, the album intersperses fragments of Chopin and Debussy with
Peters’ luminous idylls, balancing silky synths and ringing
guitars with snippets of birdsong, rain, and the occasional train
whistle. From the hallucinatory hiss and tinkle of
“Pecadillos” to the perky neovaudeville of “What
If I Came to Get You” and the melancholy piano intimations of
“Paper Cup,” Wyoming is sheer pop perfection, sweet consolation in a
noisome world.
