Tag: The Messthetics

Riffs & Reveries: Guitar odysseys from The Messthetics, Tinariwen, and Bruce Cockburn

.Reading time 8 minutes.

anthropocosmic nest

Just close your eyes and listen and you might almost convince yourself that The Messthetics were test tube engineered by some ax-obsessed mad scientist, designed to highlight every conceivable expression of electric guitar heroics. Novices should begin with the group’s self-titled 2018 debut, a library of riffs and a testament to the elasticity of the power trio. Then, when you’re ready for the real brain melt, dive into Anthropocosmic Nest, the wirier and more disruptive follow-up; an album that conveys the same technical prowess as their debut, but jolts it with the gutsiness and bravado that only a year of steady touring can bring. This is a band equally adept at building locomotive grooves and then ripping them open with crackling pyrotechnics; at crafting immaculately linear rock and roll songs, then allowing them to dissolve in bursts of static and noise. Anthropocosmic Nest is demonstrably more anarchic than its predecessor, but what makes it lovable is the ease with which The Messthetics shift between clean, conceptual playing and the biggest, dumbest, most lumbering riffs imaginable: check “Scrawler,” where a clattering countdown launches the band into throttling, in-the-red punk, then deep-space jazz noodling. “Drop Foot” thrashes and bashes but then takes a strange detour into junkyard percussion and knob-tweaking chirrup, as if the band is suddenly caught in a swarm of chirping cicadas. Don’t confuse it with “Insect Conference,” a weird minute and a half of twittering sound effects. And don’t let either of those songs fool you into thinking The Messthetics don’t do straight-ahead beauty: “Pacifica,” coasts through wave after wave of glorious melody, its moody atmospherics suggesting an alternate timeline in which The Messthetics play straight shoegaze; you’ll even hear an acoustic guitar in “Because the Mountain Says So,” as clarion as a folk song, as insistent as arena rock. These songs are epic in their build and patient in their pacing, and set the stage for at least one more curveball: “La Lontra,” the next to last song on the album, may be its sleaziest rock and roller of all. Scratch the shoegaze thing; maybe what this band was really cut out for is hair metal?

The Messthetics’ restless spirit is more than equalled by Tinariwen, a caravan of literal nomads whose new Amadjar was assembled on the go, recorded guerilla-style at campsites throughout the Sahara. The album’s title is translated as the foreign traveler, and at first blush it seems like it could have been affixed to most any album the group has made since its 1979 inception, each one of them bearing witness to the roving curiosity and low-key political dissidence of these Tuareg exilees. Upon closer listen, devotees may find that Amadjar captures their rambling nature—the paradoxical way in which they sound so tethered to their particular part of the Earth yet also so defined by their transience and homelessness— as vividly as any Tinariwen album to date. The relaxed and intoxicating album, devoid of anything you could justifiably call a rocker, drones and swirls with loose guitar jams that stretch into endless night; campfire rags featuring call-and-response singing of hymnal austerity and pentecostal fervor. One thing that sets the album apart from other Tinariwen releases is how they’ve opened their caravan to other wayfarers, allowing a number of similarly restless non-African musicians to overdub textures, wrinkles, and vibes of their own. These post-production effects are so organic you might not be able to place them without consulting the album credits; the closest to being ostentatious is probably Micah Nelson, whose spritely mandolin on “Taqkal Tarha” finds the connective tissue between Tinariwen’s African traditionalism and American folk, gospel, and blues. Stephen O’Malley, of the band Sun O))), adds sinister cinema to the ghostly “Wartilla,” a minor-key lament where dexterous finger-picked guitar seems like it’s being sucked into a black hole of electric drone. Bad Seed Warren Ellis shows up several times to add mournful violin, and Cass McCombs enmeshes his own guitars with the band’s thick bramble. These guests all supply welcome accents and color, but they never steal the spotlight from Tinariwen’s endlessly hypnotic weave of guitars, hand claps, and community sing-along vocals. Those with a fluency in the band’s native tongue will identify plenty of agitation in their lyrics, but even if you can’t offer a literal translation, you’ll still feel like you’re basically speaking the same language: Theirs is a musical vocabulary of pilgrimage, of peace and community amidst rootlessness and upheaval. What could be more universal?

On the topic of pilgrims making progress, consider Canadian troubadour Bruce Cockburn, whose close to three dozen (!!) singer/songwriter albums document a lifelong wrestling match with the Almighty, plus an extended inquiry into pancultural musical traditions. Crowing Ignites is only his second album of purely instrumental acoustic guitar music, and what astonishes about it is how it conveys the same characteristics that make his sung poetry so compelling; these compositions are literate, questing, and mystical, seeming at once tranquil and disquieted. A couple of elegiac cycles come toward the front of the album— “Easter” is a contemplative resurrection reverie, “April in Memphis” a procession through actual funeral bells— but his pensiveness is offset here by a handful of earthy surprises. Cockburn doles out snarling blues licks on “The Moan,” but better still is “The Mt. Lefroy Waltz,” swingin’ after-hours jazz guitar complete with brushed cymbals and the sympathetic groan of a muted trumpet (the latter supplied by coronet master Ron Miles). All of this is recorded by producer Colin Linden in immaculate clarity, and suggests that Cockburn is as enraptured by sound and texture as he is high-concept songwriting; consider “Bells of Gethsemane,” where the rustle of acoustic strings stands out against the backdrop of haunted chimes and singing bowls, its very title evoking the Christ-hauntedness that’s always animated Cockburn’s music. There’s a resourcefulness of sound on other songs, too: “Pibroch: The Wind in the Valley” features guitar strings that thrum and drone in simulation of Scottish bagpipes, while “Seven Daggers” cuts a crooked path through chiming kalimba, the tactility of Cockburn’s playing shrouded in otherworldly mist. Such excursionary arrangements mirror the album’s probing spirit: His fleet-fingered playing keeps these songs in perpetual motion even when the mood is reflective, trying to lay his hands to revelation beyond words.

Rattle & Thrum: Guitar heroics from The Messthetics, Nels Cline 4

.Reading time 8 minutes.

messthetics

Whatever electric guitar pyrotechnics you’re seeking, you’ll find them abounding on The Messthetics’ self-titled debut. Is it riffs you like? Discover a whole compendium of them on “Serpent Tongue,” three and a half minutes of molten licks and spiraling solos, racing a relentless low-end pulse toward certain implosion. Or maybe you prefer your guitar heroes to lay back with some chill ambiance. Try “Your Own World,” just over a minute of shadowy noir; or “Once Upon a Time,” a moody meditation that unfolds with sheets of static and noise. And if you just want to swing, start at square one: On album opener “Mythomania” the guitar snakes through a rolling beat, descending into shards of dissonance before being reset by the drummer’s crisp break. The Messthetics is an exhilarating showcase of virtuosity and technique, made by musicians far too smart to rest on finesse alone: It might have taken them an afternoon’s time to blaze through an album’s worth of solos and loose-limbed jams, but instead they’ve sculpted and shaped their electric thrum into nine exquisite tunes that are awash in melody, powered by groove, and kinetic with the possibilities of chemistry and collaboration. It’s all packaged in an album with a big, clear sound, all three instruments roughly equal in the mix—a tell in and of itself: These songs were performed with jazz dexterity, but engineered to offer gut-punch rock and roll thrills.

The vocal-less power trio comes by their sense of boundaryless, genre-agnostic possibility honestly: Drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally spent the better part of 20 years improvising a rhythmic language all their own within the hardcore trappings of Fugazi. Their rapport is critical but so is the disruptive presence of Anthony Pirog, an ax man with roots in jazz who gels perfectly with his fellow Messthetics even as he seems to keep them ever on a razor’s edge. “Mythomania” captures their high-wire balance of confidence and daring, craft and anarchy: It starts off nimble and swingin’, but the guitars become more discordant, the drummer’s pulse more haywire, until it all abruptly collapses into stomp and squall. There’s a showman’s flair to it, a real bravado in how The Messthetics are relentlessly tuneful yet take us just to the edge of chaos, and the rest of the album plays out with similar panache; between the three of them, these guys have done just about everything, and they’ve sequenced this record to condense decades of guitar innovations into a sleek suite with churning momentum and a seamless sense of mood. Listen to “Quantum Path, your local alt rock station boiled down into four minutes of pummeling, instrumental fury; its mayhem is the perfect set-up for the quick reset of “Your Own World,” followed by the taut ebb-and-flow of “The Inner Ocean,” where the guitars chime like early U2.

They save the biggest fireworks show for the album’s final few minutes: “Crowds and Power” begins as a headbanger’s ball before breaking into a dead sprint of thrash ‘n’ roll—yet even a song that’s meant to pulverize floats into passages of spacy exploration. The comedown, and the album’s lone break from the power trio format, is “The Weaver.” With a rumble of percussion, the hum of acoustic guitar strings, and even the gentle swell of a string section, the song benefits from the “Desolation Row” effect, wherein a record’s lone departure from crackling electricity somehow comes across as its rawest moment and its wildest curveball. Its placement at the album’s end is one final flush of inspiration. These guys clearly have chops, but the triumph of The Messthetics is that it’s a concise and absorbing pop record; virtuosity is never held up as an end unto itself.

They’re not the only ones who are packaging exploratory guitar work in elegant, explosive albums. Few guitarists have enjoyed careers as charmed or as diverse as Nels Cline’s, which includes regular shredding with Wilco but also an expansive back catalog of noise experimentations. In 2016 he released the big band-buffeted Lovers, a masterpiece of mood music and a heartfelt salute to Gil Evans, Bill Evans, and Quincy Jones. Now comes Currents, Constellations—recorded with a much smaller unit but once more leaning hard into straight jazz, nary a guitar freakout or dissonant patch in earshot. The band, christened the Nels Cline 4, includes Scott Colley on electric bass, Tom Rainey on drums, and Julian Lage matching Cline on guitar. (The two ax men have a buzzing Verlaine/Lloyd chemistry.) The record is all about knotty interplay, yet like The Messthetics, it’s an album that goes beyond virtuosity for its own sake: From its thick, dank sound there emerge gnarled riffs, nervous tension, and a twisted fusion of jazz improvisation with rock and roll energy. Pick any given track and you’ll hear a clear melody laid out with both ravishing beauty and frayed, beastly menace.

The menace comes mostly in the record’s steely opening salvo: “Furtive” crashes into being with the ominous splash of cymbals; Colley and Rainey sketch out a nervous, jittery rhythm, and the guitarists dance all around it with curled licks and razor-edged runs. “Swing Ghost ‘59” lurches and thumps like Frankenstein’s monster, its halting cadence suddenly opening up into irresistible mutant bebop in the song’s closing stretch. And speaking of halting cadences, “Imperfect 10” is a tight coil of off-kilter melody and rattling percussion, sounding like a Thelonious Monk tune as reimagined by Marc Ribot. These songs bundle nervous energy and dense guitar interplay into tightly tuneful packages, and their jolt of rickety energy makes it seem as though the whole album’s humming with loose electricity, even when things slow down a bit in the back stretch. “As Close As That” is a hushed continuation of Lovers’ wee small hours mood, while the set’s lone cover—Carla Bley’s “Temporarily”—is spectral and spare. Like The Messthetics, Cline’s record has an obvious and delightful outlier: Flowing with a pastoral, Veedon Fleece ambiance, “River Mouth (Parts 1 & 2) is part electric drone, part acoustic reverie—nine minutes of gentle ebb and bottomless tranquility. Just when you think you’ve heard every kind of guitar magic, a master like Cline hits you with another.