Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #9 by Stephen McClurg

Stump: Quirk Out (1986)

Stump, a band difficult to categorize, is compared most frequently to Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Stump formed right around the time that Beefheart’s last official album, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), came out, so maybe something in the ether passed on there, but Stump rarely reference the blues, a basic ingredient in the Beefheart stew. Stump comes out of pop-rock in terms of melody and punk in terms of aggressive, emphatic rhythms–though they share a similar sense of arrangement with the Magic Band: independent, weaving guitar and bass parts that lock up with the drums on certain beats, and sudden shifts of tone or tempo. Stump also reminds me of Wall of Voodoo, The Residents, or early DEVO, and were precursors to ‘90s bands like Primus or Mr. Bungle.

One characteristic that all of these bands share is a sense of humor, which turns some listeners away, something I’ve never understood. Maybe my predisposition for it was growing up and reading MAD or listening to The Muppet Movie soundtrack and enjoying the funny songs as much as the tender ones. I’ve had more than one person tell me that humor in music “makes me feel stupid.” It makes me feel human, and many of these bands revel in a type of humor that can be gleaned from literature like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (if read as a mock epic), Beckett’s Endgame (“If you must hit me, hit me with the axe.”), or Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Despite having turned into “vermin,” Samsa’s worried about getting to work on time.)

But I digress.

Quirk Out opens with “Tupperware Stripper,” a song that showcases a punk approach to the Beefheart aesthetic. Mick Lynch, the singer and songwriter, opens the song chanting about a housewife looking forward to a Tupperware party for reasons other than the plastic. Lynch frequently tells absurdist stories built from quotidian elements, yet steeped in beautiful and bizarre imagery. Don Van Vliet (the “Captain” of the Magic Band) is known for a similar approach, but Lynch doesn’t use Van Vliet’s growled dadaisms. Lynch leans toward more traditional senses of narrative and melody.

This song also showcases Kev Hopper’s idiosyncratic playing. Hopper plays fretless electric bass and utilizes the expressiveness of the instrument, and at once exploits the characteristic smooth glissando and works against it with a variety of rhythmic clicks. His lines weave traditional roots with harmonics, sliding harmonics, chords, and ghost notes that become either rhythmic or melodic depending on how he deploys them.

The second song, “Our Fathers,” is a kind of rock ballad, reminiscent of Tears for Fears or Big Country, with the exception of Hopper’s harmonics and chorusy, sliding octaves, which would have likely been performed on a synthesizer in those other bands. Stump scattered a few pop-rock ballads throughout their brief catalogue. “Our Fathers” is surprising in how comfortably one can imagine it on Top 40 radio or on a film soundtrack, yet the song has probably rarely been heard out of the UK, especially pre-Internet. The song’s lyrics are about “the sins of the fathers” or how, as Philip Larkin put it, “man hands on misery to man” without learning anything from the process.

Built out of wobbly, skronky guitar and bass lines, the verse (and guitar solo) on “Kitchen Table” is probably the most Beefheartian piece on this record. The chorus switches into a more traditional rhythm and sing-along that eventually becomes a dense, roiling noise of an ending.

“Buffalo”–their “most famous” song–was my introduction to the group. While watching the video, it’s hard to deny the charisma of Mick Lynch despite the fact that (or because?) he looks like a rubbery, spastic Tintin spouting seemingly jejune lyrics like “Swing bottom / Swing big bottom / Swing-a ling-a” or “How much is the fish? / How much is the chips? / Does the fish have chips?” My children have been dancing and singing to this song since they can remember and still request it. So it’s childish, but maybe in the purest sense. Besides, how many times can one hear “The Hot Dog Dance” or “Let It Go” and not lose it? Lynch says in a few live videos that this song is about the reincarnation of the American Buffalo, which I presume means, given the song narrative, that they come back as American tourists, “bulls” in the “china shop” of London.

Chris Salmon’s guitar solo is sublime, stuttering wonkiness. There are moments in his output with the band that sound like Snakefinger or D. Boon. He plays country licks on a few tunes reminiscent of other ‘80s oddball groups like Wall of Voodoo that had similar forays into the genre. One of my favorite songs by any group, and one that highlights Salmon’s use of country-styled guitar is “Charlton Heston” on their only full-length release A Fierce Pancake (1988). While Salmon pseudo-chicken picks, the backing rhythm is built out of a plague of croaking frogs. The lyrics are built out of puns of Biblical language along with references to film and the apocalypse. Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” is a similar example of Cold War apocalyptic anxiety filtered through humor.

“Everything In Its Place”–a sort of song built out of chorusy bass and country-esque yelps and phrasing–delineates a crude Panglossian approach to human biology, including lines like “You should be glad he put two nostrils /  in the middle of your head. / You might have to smell the roses / through your underpants instead.” “Bit Part Actor” reels like a noisy punk stomp, with a snaky, scalar guitar line that ends the verse phrases. Drummer Rob McKahey anchors this last track with what sounds like violently-played homemade percussion. Another comparison to Beefheart may be how Rob McKahey drives Stump’s music similar to how John French’s drums anchored the Magic Band. McKahey favors high hat patterns more than French, who is known for his tom and full-kit patterns. McKahey, on other releases, also plays bodhran, an Irish frame drum frequently played with a double-headed stick or tipper.

None of Stump’s work is in print, though there is an odd early and late collection available. Their other albums are worth hearing, especially if you like Quirk Out, which in some forms includes their first EP Mud on a Colon (1986). A Fierce Pancake, mentioned above, is worth hearing along with the disc of unreleased material on The Complete Anthology (2008, now also out-of-print). Their music does exist in various forms digitally, and maybe the Anthology will get released again.

In 2014, the band released a YouTube video called “Finding Mick Lynch” in which the members had gotten back together and tracked down their vocalist. Evidently this led to rehearsals and spots on the festival circuit. Unfortunately, none of it panned out as Lynch died in December 2015.

Since Lynch’s death, there has been more discussion on the Internet and more video uploads about the group. Lynch helped found an Irish puppeteering group that is still going. I would love to see any puppet work that he had either performed or had written. He also evidently did a one-man show of songs on a guitar with no strings. More recently, I’ve discovered Kev Hopper’s music. Along with free improvisation, Hopper also recorded a pop album with a single and video that is like Thomas Dolby and David Lynch collaborating with Peter Greenaway.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #8 by Stephen McClurg

Oumou Sangaré: Mogoya (2017)

Innovation in pop music seems connected to production rather than musicianship. I hear great sounds and textures sometimes in pop music, but it’s rare I get excited by musical performance. Maybe that’s my own failing in not putting in the listening hours in the genre. Whatever it may be, I’ve been enchanted by not only the production, but also the depth of musical performance on Oumou Sangaré’s recent album Mogoya.

The initial allure was a pop record played by humans. Sangaré’s voice isn’t overproduced or layered in effects. Sometimes it’s bare and raw, yet still melodic. She’s effective and beguiling in any dynamic—understated or soaring—though I do not understand the lyrics. I still enjoy music, especially pop music, with lyrics I can’t understand. Even my elementary school-age children were undaunted by the language barrier. Their reaction to this record was to simply dance.

From what I understand she sings in Wassoulou, the name of the language and region in Mali in which she lives. She has been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and is frequently working for and singing about women’s rights. Part of me dismisses needing to know anything about her biography or the lyrics in order to enjoy the music. Another part of me rejoices that she does humanitarian work and is a role model for women in and outside of Mali. Like Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, Sangaré’s music is proof that politics, poetry, and dance do not have to exclude each other. Incidentally, master drummer Tony Allen, who helped create Afrobeat with Fela, appears on Mogoya.

The album opens with the track “Bena bena” and the now iconic sound of Malian acoustic guitar. The other musicians come in together with a bass riff that drives the song–a line that plays off of the rhythmic tensions of a meter based on 3 and 4. Sangaré is also called “The Songbird of Wassalou” and as on many of the tracks, this one highlights her and her fellow singers’ voices.

“Yere Faga” carries an anti-suicide message, according to NPR. The groove and some of the synth sounds are similar to those from the Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues-era. Dark, rolling marimba chords provide an atmosphere punctuated by distorted slide guitar licks.

“Mali niale” is a ballad that is undergirded by polyrhythms, and initial chord changes that are reminiscent of the beginning of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” The similarities end there. The stars here are not surprisingly the choral and solo vocals that are powerful, but still tender enough to make the song work as a ballad.

“Kamelemba” features a syncopated bass groove that accents the and-of-2 and the 4 (as a reference, the stereotypical classic country bass plays on the one and three–the BOOMS of the BOOM-chicka rhythm). Like “Fadjamou,” it’s a nice groove-oriented dance track, but like “Mali niale” the vocals are a highlight. The interplay of the choral vocals and Sangaré’s solo voice is one of my favorite performances on the album. Complementing the weaving of the voices is the exchange between the guitar and the n’goni, an African harp with a rustic quality to it used throughout the album (a likely ancestor of the banjo).

“Koun koun,” another ballad, develops throughout the track. The bass line begins with a three note phrase and lots of space over several measures that becomes more complex as the song continues. Again, the n’goni provides a foundation and the drums eventually slide into a double-time feel. It’s a dreamy, low-key track, but one that is far from filler. “Mogoya” is a tender, gorgeous closer featuring strings and synth washes and other abstract electronic sounds that help build the soundscape for the vocals.

Song order matters and care has been taken in organizing this record. The performances and both the attention and restraint of the production team make this an overall exceptional selection of pop music. I intend to dig into Sangaré’s earlier recordings, but I am a little wary given how high the bar is set with Mogoya.

Oumou Sangaré’s Mogoya is available through her label, No Format, and other online distributors. World Circuit carries her previous releases.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #3 by Stephen McClurg

Sparks: Hippopotamus (2017)

The writers and composers work the street.

Bach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket,

Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.

~ from “Hollywood Elegies” by Bertolt Brecht (trans. Adam Kirsch)

Sparks has maintained their standards and strangeness throughout more than a four-decade career. Their new album broke the top 10 in England, the first time they’ve been on the charts since the ‘70s. They are also in their 70s and, thankfully, not an easy band to describe. Much of their work reminds me of Roxy Music filtered through musical theater. Since most of their output features songwriter Ron Mael’s keyboard and piano playing, they’ve been called “baroque pop,” which as a genre seems to mean pop music with a dash of classical instrumentation, such as the piano pitched up to sound like a harpsichord in the Beatles’ “In My Life,” or the grand little symphonies of mid-’60s Beach Boys. They’ve been called glam, and even electropop, and I can’t think of another band that has been described as a The Mothers of Invention meets the Monkees. All of that really means one never knows what to expect from a Sparks album. While not perfect, some songs lack the expected vibrancy of a Sparks track, Hippopotamus is a fun pop record, made with intelligence and wit.

“Probably Nothing” is a gorgeous opener and one of several places on the record that reminds me of Michael Nyman’s work, particularly with director Peter Greenaway. At less than two minutes of piano and vocals, with maybe four chords of strings, and a cymbal wash, it somehow manages to tell the story of almost every love song–without a chorus, or at least not a traditional one.

“Missionary Position” seems like a bad joke, but somehow they make it work. It’s a track that feels like it could be a part of a Broadway show and is an ode to either practicality, even comfort, or to a lack of adventurousness, depending on how you interpret lyrics like “You might pride yourself, you’re so Avant garde/ But we’re neoclassicists, I guess, at heart/ Patronise all you like, we both like the missionary position.” If we take that baroque pop tag seriously, Sparks is a neoclassicist group, but not just because of the piano. They aren’t working with the hippest producers, making the sickest beats, but that, overall, works in their favor. At once it announces a songwriting tradition, but also renounces fads or noise as the only options for sounding new.

I may be misreading it, but “Scandinavian Design” seems to be a response to “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, but for an Ikea generation. “Norwegian Wood,” about an affair involving John Lennon, is a reference to a type of cheap paneling that was in style at the time. In the song, a girl leaves a guy and he gets his revenge by burning the paneling to keep warm, or in some readings, by setting their love nest on fire. There is a similar relationship, in “Scandinavian Design,” though it doesn’t end in fire, but in the icy “elegance [and] simple lines” that offer “no escape.” Neither partner is happy. Neither is angry. With or without the connection to a classic song, the last twenty seconds with slide guitar are sublime.

Sparks’ lyrical wit oddly balances with a penchant for the absurd, even silly.

The title track makes me think of the Residents writing children’s music. It’s about things stuck in a pool, including a hippopotamus, which is later joined by a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. “Giddy Giddy” is at once funny and nightmarish; I envision rapping aristocrats. “Giddy” fills in for whatever slang is being used for being happy or with-it or whatever. The track feels like a dig on our culture’s frequent default to entertainments that mask deeper anxieties and resentments

“I Wish You Were Fun,” an almost perfect ballad to me, wryly takes on pop sadness. They even work in some “la la las” and lyrics like, “In every other way I find you amazing, but one / I wish you were fun” and “Glad that she’s no Ayn Rand, humorless to the nth degree.” A few tracks later, “A Little Bit Like Fun” plays like a lost ELO / Beach Boys collaboration track for an ‘80s movie soundtrack that I never knew I wanted.

“Life with the Macbeths” is powered by stately piano reminiscent of Moonlight Sonata that turns both baroque and Rosemary’s Baby with the addition of harpsichord. Lady and King Macbeth sing to each other in this bizarre, but effective, showpiece that closes the record. The lyrics reimagine the Macbeth’s on a reality show whose ratings soar with their increasingly bad behavior. Like the band itself, not everyone will enjoy this conceit, but it becomes that much better for the particular listener who does.

You can find Sparks records, interviews, and videos online.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #2 by Stephen McClurg

Junk Genius, Ghost of Electricity, (1999)

Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off …

The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face

     ~ from “Visions of Johanna,” By Bob Dylan

 I’ve been haunted by this Junk Genius recording for almost two decades. The next record that Junk Genius never made, but that I badly wanted, haunted me, too. I suppose we all have a secret playlist of the soul.

During the ‘90s, I had an obsession with Bay Area jazz and free improv recordings. Junk Genius was a Bay Area quartet of serious and exploratory musicians. Both of their records take on large song and music forms and then use their personal and group interests as filters to de-code and recombine the elements of the genre traditions they happen to be tackling.

In both instances, these musicians spent a lot of time playing from a particular tradition (bebop for the first record, the American folk tradition for the second) and then they used that musical knowledge as inspiration for sets of new tunes that explore the tones and textures of the precursor compositions and recordings. It’s not homage or throwback music.

I’m still processing their first record, but Ghost of Electricity immediately spoke to me. The photo on the cover is perfect to complement the music. This was released during the CD-era and vinyl hadn’t found its way back, but if it had, this would have been a beautiful record cover.

I like dense music, but I also like it when musicians let sounds breathe, when they use silence and space as much as knotty, note-filled passages. There is a lot of breath on this record and a spareness, maybe, again, that haunting quality. Melodies flicker and cough, and are frequently played softly.

John Schott and Ben Goldberg are precise musicians, with intelligence, wit, and soul, and this record is often about how their musical voices interweave, fray, and meet again. It’s a small version of some of the traditional American themes of there-and-back again: hobo boxcars, road trips, migrations, homecomings, rags to riches to rags.

“Gone Away,” the opening track, begins with a lilting, plaintive melodic line that captures what so much American music is devoted to: loss. What makes Junk Genius’s approach different is that they are not trying to echo these themes in lyrics or in getting a string section or toy piano, or even trying to be Ye Olde String Band. They filter that past through their own contemporary approach to improvisation that is influenced by Bill Frisell, Albert Ayler, late-era Coltrane, and angular jazz from the Chicago Art Ensemble or ECM recordings.

“Long Way” opens with the earthy, dark tones of bass and clarinet. Then the percussion rhythms are echoed by guitar arpeggios. Schott plays snippets of melodic pieces that recall the melody from “Gone Away,” though the tone is more restless, more lost. If “Angle,” the third track, were a kind of descent, “Long Way” is a floating in the darkness.

“Aberdeen” reminds me of the moment in a noir when a down-on-his-luck man wanders the streets, dusty or rain-beaten, no hope. A slight lilt here hints at the Tramp or Harold Lloyd’s Man with the Glasses.

“When” resounds with dreamy hopefulness, and with dissonant guitar chords backed by soft, malleted percussion. Goldberg plays long tones over the rest of the group. There is a buoyancy that has enough brightness to be hopeful that spills over in cymbal washes. It’s possible the title is a reference to how the American Dream seems to be something not in the present, maybe even that possibility of reaching a “when” provides some sort of hope, no matter how small or quiet.

“Indication” contains a lyrical, tuneful melody and also opens with the duo of Goldberg and Dunn. The tune finds a darker tone towards the end when after a short drum section, Dunn plays arco long tones that slide and descend. The interplay throughout this section is interesting because you can hear all four musicians pick up threads of melody or rhythm from each other and reconfigure them back out into the group. There is a restlessness, a searching quality, in the performance that realizes an ideal Americanness.

You can get Junk Genius’s records from online distributors and their label Songlines.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.