05
Oct
2004
In 1989, the avant-garde composer and sax player John Zorn released Naked City, which I’ve always described as “death jazz.” The album featured an all-star band tackling music that ranged from short blasts of violent noise (with tracks as short as eight seconds) to beautifully atmospheric interpretations of classic film music, including a kick-ass version of the theme from the James Bond movies.
As fun as the album is, it’s always seemed a bit too willfully alienating, with a midsection bordering on the unlistenable.
The Quad Cities band The Metrolites has smoothed out Zorn’s vision – dispensing with the ear-splitting difficulty that turned Zorn’s record into an endurance contest – while retaining its central conceit: approaching genre music, from surf to spy, inventively and earnestly, while also acknowledging its inherent silliness. Like Naked City, the band’s new The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is a genre-hopping joy, with neck-breaking tempo and idiom changes, great chops, and strong songwriting. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.
You can get some sense of what you’re in for with some of the titles, from the mixed motifs of “Gunfight at the Zombie Mineshaft” to the clever wordplay of the “The Man in the Dorian Gray Flannel Suit.” This is an album with its tongue definitely in cheek, yet there’s nothing slapdash about the execution.
Led by Scott Morschhauser, who sings and plays the unconventional instruments (theremin – that warbly staple of cheesy sci-fi scores of the 1950s – and various electronic percussion), the band also includes guitarist Kathleen Gallagher, drummer Josh Duffee, sax player Nervous Neal Smith, and bassist Devin Kirby-Hansen.
The group is tight and deft; on any given track, you never know which player is going to take the lead, or what style might hop into the mix. On “Sin,” an atmospheric mallet opening gives way to Gallagher’s muscular guitar and Smith’s smooth sax, while a sinister theremin theme carries “Gunfight at the Zombie Mineshaft” – a track so vivid that you can nearly see the action of the title.
The album is evenly split between instrumental tracks and proper songs with lyrics and vocals. The instrumentals jump out immediately with their superior musicianship and meaty hooks. “The Man from M.E.T.R.O.” kicks things off briskly, with themes that return in brief tracks such as “The Man from M.E.T.R.O. Takes Five” and “Love Theme from The Man from M.E.T.R.O.”
The music is detail-rich, particularly on the instrumentals. “Sin” features a deep, almost inaudible bass rumble that portends doom, and the track also features all manner of percussion as it segues from slinky film noir to hard-edged spy riffs to galloping Western themes; nearly the entirety of disreputable film genres gets its due in under five minutes.
If there’s a weak link on The Metrolites in Spy-Fi, it’s the vocals. Morschhauser’s voice sometimes works in a mad-scientist sort of way, particularly on overtly goofy tracks such as “The Blob” (“It creeps / And leaps / And glides and slides / Across the floor”) and “Cyclops Optometrist” (“Who’s that man with an eye for the ladies?”), with a beautifully realized chorus that simply couldn’t be better. But that voice is sometimes a liability, just a touch overdramatic and tremulous on songs that beg for a treatment slightly less askew, such as “Empty Bed” and the countrified “TV Drugs.”
But the lyrics are filled with cleverness, from the sublimely ridiculous (“He’s six-foot-three from head to knee”) to lines both funny and observant (“She had some curves, so did the road / That was the problem, I got caught watching the wrong ones”).
Still, the words can’t quite elevate those songs to the high standards set by the instrumentals; the music on the tracks with vocals is less compelling, and the singing brings everything perilously close to farce. And because The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is frontloaded with instrumentals, the second half of the album is not as strong as the first.
This is, in other words, a CD with two faces. Only “Cyclops Optometrist” succeeds at melding the band’s lyrical strength with its biggest asset: the ability to create new, twisted sonic worlds out of recycled film-score components. That song alone is worth the price of admission, and if the rest of the album falls somewhat short of its high-water mark, it’s still a tremendous debut.
The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is available at local record stores or from the band’s Web site (http://www.metrolites.com). The band will perform Friday, October 8, at 7 p.m. at Borders in Davenport; Friday and Saturday, October 15 and 16, at 8 p.m. at Copia in Rock Island; Friday, October 22, at 7 p.m. at Mojo’s in Davenport; and Saturday, October 23, at 10 p.m. at the Brew & View in Rock Island.
As fun as the album is, it’s always seemed a bit too willfully alienating, with a midsection bordering on the unlistenable.
The Quad Cities band The Metrolites has smoothed out Zorn’s vision – dispensing with the ear-splitting difficulty that turned Zorn’s record into an endurance contest – while retaining its central conceit: approaching genre music, from surf to spy, inventively and earnestly, while also acknowledging its inherent silliness. Like Naked City, the band’s new The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is a genre-hopping joy, with neck-breaking tempo and idiom changes, great chops, and strong songwriting. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.
You can get some sense of what you’re in for with some of the titles, from the mixed motifs of “Gunfight at the Zombie Mineshaft” to the clever wordplay of the “The Man in the Dorian Gray Flannel Suit.” This is an album with its tongue definitely in cheek, yet there’s nothing slapdash about the execution.
Led by Scott Morschhauser, who sings and plays the unconventional instruments (theremin – that warbly staple of cheesy sci-fi scores of the 1950s – and various electronic percussion), the band also includes guitarist Kathleen Gallagher, drummer Josh Duffee, sax player Nervous Neal Smith, and bassist Devin Kirby-Hansen.
The group is tight and deft; on any given track, you never know which player is going to take the lead, or what style might hop into the mix. On “Sin,” an atmospheric mallet opening gives way to Gallagher’s muscular guitar and Smith’s smooth sax, while a sinister theremin theme carries “Gunfight at the Zombie Mineshaft” – a track so vivid that you can nearly see the action of the title.
The album is evenly split between instrumental tracks and proper songs with lyrics and vocals. The instrumentals jump out immediately with their superior musicianship and meaty hooks. “The Man from M.E.T.R.O.” kicks things off briskly, with themes that return in brief tracks such as “The Man from M.E.T.R.O. Takes Five” and “Love Theme from The Man from M.E.T.R.O.”
The music is detail-rich, particularly on the instrumentals. “Sin” features a deep, almost inaudible bass rumble that portends doom, and the track also features all manner of percussion as it segues from slinky film noir to hard-edged spy riffs to galloping Western themes; nearly the entirety of disreputable film genres gets its due in under five minutes.
If there’s a weak link on The Metrolites in Spy-Fi, it’s the vocals. Morschhauser’s voice sometimes works in a mad-scientist sort of way, particularly on overtly goofy tracks such as “The Blob” (“It creeps / And leaps / And glides and slides / Across the floor”) and “Cyclops Optometrist” (“Who’s that man with an eye for the ladies?”), with a beautifully realized chorus that simply couldn’t be better. But that voice is sometimes a liability, just a touch overdramatic and tremulous on songs that beg for a treatment slightly less askew, such as “Empty Bed” and the countrified “TV Drugs.”
But the lyrics are filled with cleverness, from the sublimely ridiculous (“He’s six-foot-three from head to knee”) to lines both funny and observant (“She had some curves, so did the road / That was the problem, I got caught watching the wrong ones”).
Still, the words can’t quite elevate those songs to the high standards set by the instrumentals; the music on the tracks with vocals is less compelling, and the singing brings everything perilously close to farce. And because The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is frontloaded with instrumentals, the second half of the album is not as strong as the first.
This is, in other words, a CD with two faces. Only “Cyclops Optometrist” succeeds at melding the band’s lyrical strength with its biggest asset: the ability to create new, twisted sonic worlds out of recycled film-score components. That song alone is worth the price of admission, and if the rest of the album falls somewhat short of its high-water mark, it’s still a tremendous debut.
The Metrolites in Spy-Fi is available at local record stores or from the band’s Web site (http://www.metrolites.com). The band will perform Friday, October 8, at 7 p.m. at Borders in Davenport; Friday and Saturday, October 15 and 16, at 8 p.m. at Copia in Rock Island; Friday, October 22, at 7 p.m. at Mojo’s in Davenport; and Saturday, October 23, at 10 p.m. at the Brew & View in Rock Island.
