TRIS
McCALL - Let The Night Fall (Melody Lanes
Records)
Tris McCall’s last record took us on
a guided tour of hipster Williamsburg, using
both metaphor and keen powers of observation
to convey a keenly felt sense of time and
place. On Let The Night Fall, McCall’s
back in his beloved New Jersey, whether celebrating
the Garden State’s unique cultural institutions
(“WFMU,” “The Throwaway,”
“Sugar Nobody Wants,”) schoolyard
bullies (“You’re Dead After School,”)
summer camp humiliations (“We Could
Be The Killers,’) or - of course –
backroom politics (“The Ballad Of Frank
Vinieri.”) Jean Shepherd once called
New Jersey the birthplace of Slob Art, where
even the largest cities exist as suburbs of
someplace bigger; and no one captures that
unique blend of arrogance and inferiority-complex
better than Tris McCall: “Mountainside”
is his answer to “My Home Town”
(all Jersey songwriters have to measure themselves
against The Boss sooner or later) while the
seven-and-a-half-minute magnum opus “First
World, Third Rate” traces the history
of Jersey culture from colonial wheatfields
right up to the salad-bar spit-shield at your
favorite strip mall. Along the way, you get
the rollicking piano and synth-based pop that
Tris has been creating for nearly two decades,
combining witty wordplay with catchy tunesmithing
(there’s even a short semi-classical
instrumental to show off his chops.) Since
Tris had to record this album without a band
to call his own, a small army of guest stars
contribute performances and vocals, including
Overlord’s Steve Pasles, Cropduster’s
Lee Estes, My Teenage Stride’s Britt
Whitmoyer, Prosolar Mechanics’ Amy Jacob,
various members of the Negatones and Palomar,
and the Hon. Jerramiah T. Healy, mayor of
Jersey City, whom you’ll hear harmonizing
on the elegiac album closer, “Sunrise,
Rte. 7.” And finally there’s the
title track, nothing less than a reaffirmation
of our American faith – Tris’
Obama moment, if you will: “Let the
night fall,” he sings, because by dawn’s
early light, we’ll still be here…
in the land of the free, and the home of the
weird. (www.trismccall.net) – Jim Testa
LANDSPEEDRECORD!
- Unfailurelessness (Cattle Dog Records)
In true gonzo fashion, when the going gets
weird, these weirdos get going. Aversion.com
called Baltimore’s LandSpeedRecord!
“brilliantly weird,” which does
an admirable job of summing up the oeuvre
of frontman Charley Jamison, whose lyrics
over the past 13 years have included forays
deep into the disturbed minds of serial killers,
teen suicides, libidinous office employees,
the disabled, and the disenfranchised. Nothing’s
changed much on Unfailurelessness,
LSR’s first new release in a while;
the quadruple-negative of the title track
underlines Jamison’s obsession with
writing outside the lines, ranting about society’s
outsiders in a keening wail set to the relentlessly
twitchy post-punk giddyup of Marc Berrong’s
drums and Tom Stehr’s percolating bass.
It might all seem like a pastiche of David
Byrne’s “Psycho Killer”
if not for a couple of things: First, these
guys can all play; the musicianship on an
LSR record (despite constantly shifting lineups
over the years) is always first-rate. Secondly,
Jamison has a way of turning a familiar phrase
on its head, effortlessly snapping off strings
of witty one-liners and transformingn the
commonplace into the creepy. Jamison routinely
makes intimacy seem but suspect and unnatural
(“Save Us From Ourselves”) and
twists fate like taffy (or a Stephen King
novel) on “Reversals;” I’m
not exactly sure what’s happening at
“Barnes Common” but I know I don’t
want to go there alone. LandSpeedRecord! will
have you looking over your shoulder as you
bounce around your room; paranoia and obsession
have never rocked this hard. – Jim Testa
(www.morphius.com)
