The
Meltdowns
No Authority, Direction, Or Control
From: The North Jersey exurbs.
Much of No Authority, Direction, Or Control
was recorded in Edison, and the rest in Verona.
For awhile, the lead guitarist was living
in bucolic Montclair – an artsy-establishment
town with a solid antiauthoritarian punk rock
tradition. These days, the Meltdowns are based
in Jersey City, which is probably not a wise
career move, but they fit here anyway. While
they play things quite a bit rougher than
either group, No Authority, Direction, Or
Control is occasionally reminiscent of American
Watercolor Movement and Flaming Fire. Like
those bands, the Meltdowns make music best
suited to all-night spazz-out dance parties
in basements, squats, crumbling warehouses,
and art galleries. They’ve even written
a song about it: on “Shelter”,
one of the more moving tracks on this very
affecting EP, Adam Copeland sings “no
sign on the door, no name, no warning, no
maximum occupancy, and no insurance.”
Yes, we’ve all been there. This version
of Jersey City is rapidly becoming outdated,
and you get the sense that The Meltdowns are
only sticking around as long as there’s
still some semblance of an unauthorized-rock
subculture operating here.
Format: Six-song EP. These
are relatively long songs, though. The last
track, a surf-punk demolition tellingly titled
“Dick Dale the Vampire”, feels
like a bit of a tack-on, but it’s not
like it isn’t enjoyable, or consistent
with the hyperactive tone and astringent taste
of the rest of the set.
Fidelity: Okay. The Meltdowns
have only themselves to blame for the mud
that often clogs their midrange: they dig
their effects processors, and they haven’t
yet figured out how to tame their delay units.
But theirs are sins of enthusiasm, and as
such, they’re easily forgiven –
especially since the vocals and drums are
generally clear.
Genre: There’s an
old strategic tradition among leftist songwriters
that goes something like this: let’s
get ‘em dancing, and when we do, we’ll
drop a whole bunch of incendiary anti-war
and anti-capitalist stuff on them. That way,
the mind and the booty are equally stimulated;
you know, to each according to its need. Guitarist
Billy Gray does not (or will not) play like
Andy Gill, but his band is closer to the anarchic
spirit of Gang Of Four than any of the recent
spate of dance-rock imitators. That said,
The Meltdowns are almost reflexively funky:
almost every part played in every song is
syncopated. Sometimes, the beat gets subdivided
electronically (delay and phasing will do
that), but usually they’re all playing
so frenetically that they create their own
white-boy polyrhythms. I bring up the band’s
dancefloor moves as a caution to trend-spotters:
I could call this GOF-inspired funk-punk,
see, but then you might think it sounds like
Franz Ferdinand. And it doesn’t, not
at all. But more importantly, nobody in Franz
Ferdinand is ever going to hurl an accusation
at its audience like “you fund the murder
of your brothers and you consent to the rape
of your sisters.” That sort of thing
cuts away from the corporate bottom line.
The Meltdowns are not businessman-rockers;
they’re not mining nuggets from the
lost caverns of London ‘79. They’re
just playing it as it comes to them, and speaking
out as they do.
Photo by Colleen
Gutwein
Arrangements: Busy. Drums,
bass, and a maelstrom of percussion; rhythm
guitar and digitally-effected lead, electric
piano; vox, chants, random shouts. And everything
hits at once.
What’s this record about?:
Though the writing is often evocative and
occasionally even figurative, there’s
nothing cryptic about No Authority, Direction,
Or Control. The Meltdowns are convinced that
Western consumer capitalism and its accompanying
militarism have made a hash of the world,
and their words are meant to be an intervention.
They don’t have messianic visions of
their band or anything; they just want to
get you to think about what you’re doing,
and how you’re cooperating with the
death machine. The narrators of “Tonight
We Dine” are ripping up the earth to
ensure their own luxury; they barely care
that they’re killing their own capacities
for sympathy and humanity as they do. In order
to live large on the bones of the underclass,
we’ve got to desensitize ourselves to
our own casual violence. “Club Sedition”
draws a not-so-tenuous connection between
exclusive nightclubs and the black sites and
secret torture chambers overseen by the CIA
and the U.S. military. (Just in case you don’t
get it, there’s a spoken-word section
about waterboarding during the “disco”
breakdown between verses two and three.) The
most scathing track on a set of acidic anti-establishment
broadsides, “Comeback” calls the
American people “gears in a vast machine
that rains fire on the helpless.” “You
know what your taxes pay for”, sneers
Copeland. By now we all do, or we ought to,
anyway. The Meltdowns betray some fondness
for love-amidst-the-ruins narratives; “For
Tomorrow” is a post-apocalyptic love
story that is, to be fair, less erotic than
it is politically defiant. Then again, Prince’s
fantasies of nuclear holocaust aside, there’s
nothing sexy about trenches, mass graves,
or air-raid sirens. “Shelter”,
the penultimate track, could be the story
of Jersey City circa summer ‘07: kids
crowded in a basement to hear rock music,
and not merely because there’s no place
else to go. It’s an acknowledgement
that as autocrats strip away our right to
assembly, parties in unauthorized spaces might
be fertile territory for fruitful dissent.
A telling clause in the infamous JC noise
ordinance exempts the local government from
any of the restrictions slapped on private
rockers. The message is clear: the authorities
are fine with making a racket as long as they’re
the ones behind the bullhorns. After years
of shutting down anything that looks suspicious,
social control becomes a habit. Worse than
that, it becomes a comfortable and widely-accepted
state of affairs; just the way we do things
around here. The Meltdowns are asking us to
step back and take a good look at what we’ve
accepted – things done in our name by
those with power over our lives. Their vision
of a cruel, fascist and militarist state may
be extreme, but in 2008, I am afraid it’s
no caricature.
The singer: Frontmen in
earnest-progressive bands like The Meltdowns
are supposed to chant their choruses, keep
time, shout their heads off when they have
to, and stay out of the way of the guitars.
Holding pitch isn’t generally an issue,
and nor is displaying much emotional range.
To his credit, Adam Copeland transcends the
stereotype: he’s a strong and sure singer
who enunciates clearly, and who rarely resorts
to cheap bellowing. True, he falls back on
his “breathless” voice a little
too frequently, but it suits the subject matter
– part of the problem with The Thermals’
left-wing concept album was that Hutch Harris
never sounded like he was on the run from
the Feds. Copeland, on the other hand, seems
genuinely beleaguered, and that really helps
keep No Authority, Direction, Or Control from
tipping into straight agitprop. He’s
not detached or diagnostic, hectoring at us
from a position safety; he’s right there
in the shit, a young man lost in America,
beset by an establishment drunk on its own
aggression and adrenaline.
The band:
You could dance to this funk-punk, I guess,
though you might break your ankles if you
try. Almost everything is played fast and
hard, and most songs build to some kind of
thunderous instrumental climax. Copeland and
Gray don’t trade guitar licks as much
as they set their six-strings against each
other like roosters in a cock-fight. There’s
usually a rhythm guitar part scrobbling away
in the background, another part reinforcing
the bottom-end, and an effect-saturated lead
soaring over the top; often, this is all going
on while Copeland is singing. Bassist Gerry
Griffin V adds his own instrument to the fray;
he holds down the roots pretty firmly, but
he also editorializes, syncopates, and boldly
ventures into the midrange. Then there’s
the frantic percussion, the nosy electric
piano that refuses to sit comfortably in the
mix, or those signal-warping effects that
The Meltdowns dig. Drummer Lloyd Naideck has
the brutal task of holding all of this together
and making it move, and he’s generally
up to it – but, as always, when there’s
this much rhythmic complexity going on, there
are a few noticeable speedups and slowdowns.
Or to put it more precisely, there are moments
when no matter how steady they’re keeping
it, it feels like the band is speeding up
or slowing down. This is particularly true
on the multi-section “Comeback”,
which must have been a nightmare to record.
But since all Meltdown songs are constructed
according to an additive logic, they’re
all susceptible to the kind of rhythmic lurches
caused by sonic overload. It’s only
a problem if you are trying to dance. Honestly,
saturating the midrange like this assists
the group’s theme: it really does sound
like Copeland is surrounded by hostile elements
beyond his control. I ought to mention that
several of Gray’s solos are imaginative,
and arise, mushroom-cloud like, from the chaos;
“For Tomorrow” is probably the
best ride, but this technique is repeated
elsewhere on the EP. I doubt he has any patience
for an elitist form like art-prog, but I have
to believe Robert Fripp would approve.
The songs: Minor-key; verse,
chorus, and middle-breakdown. Most are built
from grooves that are subsequently soaked
in acid, machine-washed, and hung out to dry
in a radioactive breeze. In plain, non-hyperbolic
English, that means that while Meltdown songs
often feel section-heavy, the band doesn’t
really assemble their songs from parts. Instead,
basic guitar and bass patterns are allowed
to develop and change as they’re repeated
– and when a band is as hyperactive
as this one is, the rate of mutation is accelerated.
The exception is “For Tomorrow”,
the closest thing on No Authority, Direction,
Or Control to a modern-rock radio cut.
Photo by Colleen
Gutwein
What distinguishes this record from
others of its genre?: Many notable
liberal rockers have made careers out of finger-wagging
in the general direction of the White House.
George W. Bush, we are told, is an awful tyrant
who has done terrible things; should we impeach
him or otherwise get free of him, the sun
will shine again. He’s the offender,
and we’re his victims. This is not how
The Meltdowns roll. Copeland is the rare neo-progressive
singer willing to risk the affections of his
audience members by implicating them all in
the grand sphere of national wrongdoing. The
military death machine he sings about in “Comeback”
wouldn’t need to exist if it weren’t
for the demands of the material-minded American
consumers in “Tonight We Dine”.
The Meltdowns are outraged by the current
regime, sure, but they’re also furious
about mainstream complicity with what they
see as state-sanctioned cruelty. “When
you know what’s being done in your name”
(and who doesn’t?), “you look
away, you feel no shame.” Rhetorical
strategies like these are most closely associated
with the radical fringes of the academy and
certain passé strains of hardcore punk.
Most contemporary indie bands run screaming
from any kind of critique, but even those
who do not are loath to call out their listeners.
Consider how a politically-engaged writer
like Bruce Springsteen would handle something
like “Club Sedition”: chances
are, he’d try to get inside the head
of the reluctant torturer, “just doin’
his job” under the cover of the flag,
or the conflicted home-front warrior with
his child in jail, or some other portrait
in pained, star-spangled ambivalence. None
of that for The Meltdowns – they turn
to the crowd and say “you, fellow first-world
Anglo, you’ve got blood on your hands”.
American self-flagellation might be a growth
industry in the near future, but The Meltdowns’
stance won’t endear them to those members
of the mainstream media establishment who
bother to listen to lyrics. Commendably, they
don’t seem to care.
What’s not so good?:
Guitar delay is no way to treat a drummer.
All joking aside, effects in the delay, echo,
and echoplus family have an unfortunate tendency
to cloud the mix and trip up the groove. I
don’t know what sort of processors The
Meltdowns use, but the rule still applies:
the more guitars in a mix, the less the effect
is necessary. As I said in the “band”
section, part of this is intentional, or at
least unintentionally-intentional –
sometimes The Meltdowns just want to prove
a point by making a mess. I feel them on that.
But there are other moments where it seems
like the band wants to clear away the racket
and deliver something tight and powerful,
and the fingers won’t quite come together
to make a fist. For the next release, they’ll
want to strip away some of the guitar, eliminate
a bit of the syncopation and cross-rhythmic
complexity, dial down the effects, and simplify
some of their kitchen-sink arrangements. Not
all the time; God forbid, but some of the
time. Occasionally, guys, occasionally; just
as a contrast.
Recommended?: I had a professor
in college – a really good professor
– who used to complain bitterly about
sweeping indictments made by leftists. The
problem with hardcore progressives, he argued,
was that their assignation of moral culpability
to people with no stake in corrupt regimes.
He singled out the popular reception of Eichmann
in Jersualem for abuse: no, no matter how
banal and commonplace evil might be, we’re
not “all Adolf Eichmann”. That
was the early Nineties and the very beginning
of the first Clinton administration, and things
were, ever so briefly, looking up. Since then,
we’ve seen plenty. We’ve fought
two wars of choice (funny how often Democrats
forget about our misadventures in Yugoslavia).
President Clinton ordered his first aerial
bombardment of Baghdad in June 1993; since
then, it seems as if the bombs have never
stopped falling. Evidence continues to pile
up that our extravagant, consumption-based
lifestyles are contributing to the destruction
of the planet. In the past fifteen years,
the national incarceration rate has blown
past Russia’s and Iran’s: with
close to two and a half million Americans
behind bars, we’re now the world’s
leading jailer. That means, according to the
Pew Center, that about 1 in 100 U.S. citizens
are currently on lockdown. No, you didn’t
do that, and neither did I; it’s not
the world we wanted. Still, like Ronald Reagan
used to say, it happened on our watch. What’s
more, much of America got rich and comfortable
on our watch – we settled in as the
world burned around us. We don’t have
to torch our possessions and take up arms,
but it is incumbent on all of us to speak
out, even when those in power don’t
want to hear what we have to say. Or, as Adam
Copeland puts it, “if you cannot see
your victims, if you turn your eyes away from
the dead, if you keep your mouth shut when
they scream, you sign the bottom line”.
You know what? He’s right.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?:
Ever the good collectivists, the
boys in The Meltdowns run Tankcrash!, their
own record cartel. I’ll never understand
why more indie bands don’t get together
and do this – it doesn’t cost
anybody anything, and nobody’s life
gets signed away to a multinational entertainment
conglomerate. The band will be hitting the
road this spring; before then, they’ll
be doing radio sets on WFMU and WRSU . They’ll
also be playing a legal fundraiser for the
Powerhouse Arts District in Jersey City, which,
given the band’s proto-anarchist and
anti-government sympathies, may strike you
as an odd thing for them to do. Then again,
it certainly beats singing for the cops.
The Meltdowns will be appearing
at Bar Matchless on Friday, March 21. For
more information visit www.themeltdowns.com
YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS by Tris McCall
