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Hardly had I begun listening to this - the Zelienople sophomore (alt.title?)
- than I realised I was in trouble. Barely twenty seconds into the opening
track - Sea Bastards - and thinking - Ligeti? Lamonte Young? A Reminder
period Radiohead? Slint? Tortoise? - I was gone, done for, drained, vanquished,
defeated. I have to say that I can hardly remember enjoying a first acquaintance
with a new band more, nor wanting to write about one less.
I do think about it sometimes - the definitive absurdity inherent in trying
to write about music. There's a non-attributable aphorism that gets aired
from time to time under different guises - that writing about music is like
dancing about architecture. I do consider that a particularly inept remark
- evidently made by someone with no interest in or understanding of either
dance or architecture in general, or the work of people like Rudolf Laban,
Pina Bausch, Twyla Tharpe, Rosemary Butcher, or the Bauhaus Group in particular.
But the motivation is sound: writing about music is an act of translation
- one which, the better the music, the greater the redundancy of the translation.
It's there - there it is – just listen - it's self-evidently doing its
job - it doesn't need explaining. But this funny symbiosis has developed,
as part of the culture show, between the musicians and the translator-critics
whereby, in order to draw the attention of a wider-than-local audience to
their work, they (the musicians) submit - more or less reluctantly - to the
fatuous attentions of the scribblers, in the hope that someone might find
a way of talking about it that says more about it (the music) than about themselves.
Fat chance.
Zelienople is a quartet from Chicago, although that's about as relevant as
saying that milk comes from cows (but why they’re named after a small
town in Pennsylvania remains a mystery – prolly cos they liked the sound
of it). Their record label - Loose Thread - offers 'the drone-based legacy
of 60's American minimalism, 70's ambient rock, 80's space rock, and 90's
electro-acoustic improv music' as a descriptive starting-point. Although meant
to be helpfully generic, this is actually a little misleading, in that it
makes them sound rather nerdish and anal, whereas their music is the opposite
- intelligent, certainly, drone-based, certainly, and restrained, but generously
so, dispensing blissful packets of psychic balm with the reassuring authority
of a seldom-seen but much-loved gay uncle. And the ensemble! They sound as
though they've been working and playing together for at least a lifetime,
hewing away in the mapless caves of the unconscious, piling up a hard-won
mountain of ore from which to smelt this singular ten-tracked musical nugget.
Sleeper Coach has to be one of the most laid-back albums I've ever heard.
I swear there's some kind of a subliminal hypnagogic trigger thing going on:
whenever I'm listening on headphones I seem regularly to doze off around track
6 - Corner Lot - only to stir back into fuller hyper-enhanced attention
for track 7 - Don't Be Lonely. If Zelienople were with a more profiteering
bunch like EMI, this would have been the one they'd have released as a single
two months earlier to whet our appetites: singer Matt Christensen's whispery
close-mic'd high voice inserted like a sleepy fey over the slow-roiling sedimentary
depositions of a repeated two-bar guitar riff. The particular flavours in
this noise-soup have been derived from entirely non-synthetic sources: Christensen
plays bass, guitar, and organ, Brian Harding plays B-flat and bass clarinets,
piano, and guitar, Mike Weis plays drum kit (as sparingly as if it were made
of antique glass), vibraphone, and various eastern percussion instruments,
and Neil Jendon plays guitar. Put all those together and you're clearly going
to end up, so long as you manage to avoid kitsch, klezmer or Jewish weddings,
with something delicious and wholesome but not a little odd, so it comes as
no surprise to learn that they've been engaged lately in supporting bands
like Múm and Tristeza, and bill-sharing with people like The Decemberists
and Gravenhurst – magnificently quirky left-fielders all.
Listen (and try and stay awake) and attend – the Sleeper Coach
won’t necessarily end up taking you where it says on the ticket, but
you’re in safe hands, and (trust me, I’m a critic) you’ll be
glad you stayed the ride.
22nd February 2005
