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This issue: "Litterbugs Beware..."
by Ken Cormier
Book Review by Steve Prygoda
Video Review by Patrick Penta
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Shoot the Professor by Joe S. Harrington This issue: "LITTERBUGS BEWARE! TRIS MCCALL IS HANDING OUT ASS-WHIPPINGS (TAKE ONE AND PASS ‘EM BACK): ASH-SCATTERING WITH JERSEY’S FAVORITE SON"
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Tris McCall is the greatest New Jersey rock artist since the heyday of Patti and Bruce (w/ apologies to Yo La Tengo, Love Child and Marianne Nowottny). How do I know this? Because on his last album, If One of These Bottles Should Happen to Fall, he fashioned an intricate song-cycle about the Garden State, combining everything from spastic Costello gesticulations to Hip Hop to the most outta-site shimmer-pop since vintage Game Theory (Scott Miller lent a helping hand). On his new album, Shoot Out at the Sugar Factory, NJ is still the backdrop as well as inspiration, but this time there’s a grim and foreboding theme, enhanced by the new wave effects that make this album a kind of Diamond Dogs for a new generation except Tris’s drug isn’t kinky sex or decadent scenes, but OMINISCIENCE and this album reeks of a kind of cleverness that’s staggering. It also is the most important post-9/11 urban opus from a New Jersey artist (including Springsteen’s attempts). Whereas on the first album McCall was still in the troubadour vein of Dylan or Matlin—a singer/songwriter in other words—on this album he’s competing with Gary Numan. Did I mention it’s the best neo-new wave album since the Faint’s Danse Macabre? But while those feebs employed their deliberately-retro stylings to hail the swoosh of homosexual oblivion, Tris is actually spoutin’ a fount o’ no-nonsense wisdom that has little to do with personal politics and everything to do with his whole shrugged-shouldered everyman approach to his muse.
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Tris’s embrace of technological effects on this album—I can hear the snapdrum whirr—doesn’t mean he’s forsaken his troubadour roots. Other than the troublesome opener, “Scatter My Ashes on the Jersey Turnpike,” what we basically have here is an intelligent, well-focused collection of wry tunes that would work in ANY format. It’s not all effects in other words—track number seven in particular, “Another Public Service Announcement,” is an almost Jerry Jeff Walkeresque triumph, a protest song against LITTERBUGS of all things. Once again, Tris has much more earthly concerns than his techno-rock forebears…that’s why this album is like a bizarre merger of Springsteen meets Rundgren during his kozmik-suited spaceboy phase.
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On the previous album, there were such poignant ballads as “I’ll Be Missing You”—on Shootout, the most heartfelt number is the previously mentioned anti-litterbug opus. Most of these songs deal with our present-day woes living in the throes of the post-everything culture…it’s about overkill mainly: “Welcome to the food court,” he sings, “then go back to west New York.” Tris sees the sprawl of mallville in horrific terms, and reacts with a combination of contempt and sadness. Tris’s vision of Big Brother isn’t of the homosexual Buck Rogers variety like Bowie—and he’s also warning that the enemy is within as well as without. After all, the anti-litterbug paean ain’t directed strictly at corporate swine who use the streets of Tris’s neighborhood as their personal ashcan—it’s also aimed at the hipster, coming home from Maxwell’s or wherever, who dumps his slurpee on the floor of the night bus. |
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The vision McCall’s laying down on this album is one of a hollowed-out universe made only less promising by the cloak-like aura of oppression being laid down by Bush and his cronies, not to mention Bloomburg across the river (hey Tris may live in Jersey, but he has to play in New York). His music may be Jersey-based, but it says just as much about the current state of New York City. But it’s not just politics that we have to worry about, Tris seems to be saying on this album—it’s also ourselves. Hence the turbulence of the songs on Shootout, which once again has an almost futuristic veneer, only matched by the nocturnal sheen of the LP cover, where the maddening dots of the power grid take on a translucent aura as everything around them fades to black. How ironic that this alb was just getting shipped when the whole East Coast blacked out in the middle of August—now that it’s here, it’s obvious that only darker times are to come. The rumbling opener, “Throw My Ashes on the Jersey Turnpike,” is in the same league as something like, say, Hendrix’s “Exp” (or “Devo Corporate Anthem”): not so much a full-fledged track as a kind of premonition that sets the tone for the whole album. It’s a chaotic piece giving little glimpse of the more enlightened use of “technology”—in the form of synth and snapdrum—that lies ahead on this album. Seriously, this is the album BECK should be making now, and Tris McCall is the real Beck! |
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After this one introductory piece of static, it doesn’t take long for Tris to get into his groove…which on this album just happens to be “new wave” ala such other current practitioners of the snap-drum politik as the Faint, the Postal Service, the Fever and I Am the World Trade Center. But Tris’s embrace of the cool atmospherics of eighties rock isn’t meant as a contrived pose, like those groups, but an organic solution to providing the kind of musical backdrop that these visionary songs warrant. Hence the danceable jigging of “Dancing to Architecture” (which is snap-drum heaven), the Costello Get Happy-ish “The Night Bus” (once again the snapdrum whaps heavily) and “Machines To Make You Feel Good.” The latter draws Beck comparisons again in the sweet use of rolling organ—downright soulful—and all throughout this album, various types of keyboards and electronic effects—once again, hail the almighty snap drum—augment the textures of Tris’s remarkably insightful social commentary. Make no mistake, Tris is still a “singer/songwriter”: even if he’s now popping his bop gun to great swells of synth, every song on this album rings with the Tom Payne persistence of the classic troubadour. I still say he’s the Dylan of our age—and if you recall, when Dylan first landed in the East, his original home was not New York City, but East Orange, New Jersey. And there’s the rub—Tris comes from a long tradition of highway bandits who make their living pointing out life’s poignant details in a way that less observant folks might’ve missed. The GOOD news is, unlike a lot of these worried whizzkids, who are merely content to plunk out the eight millionth variation of “Worried Man Blues” or “Fixin’ to Die,” stark and earnest, Tris ain’t afraid to pull out all the showstoppers (the BECK thing again), bells and whistles, whaling saxophones (listen to the Bowiesque horns in “Robert Menendez Basta Ya”) and walls of keyboards to try to do something DIFFERENT, for the first time in a hundred years, with the whole “folk” tradition… |
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Gotta love the guy’s voice too—while most of those hoary old folksingers sound like they gargle with sandpaper and sleep in the reception area of the Don’t Drop In as they wait to be summoned as Tom Waits’ understudy in a desperate bid for “authenticity,” Tris couldn’t sound more lovably unaffected—as modern day crooners go, he ain’t quite Scott Miller, but he’s way better than Michael Penn (a fact already proven on “Hung By a Jury,” the magnum opus on LP #1). In this way, like Beck’s previous use of horns and other ginchy effects, the synthesizer sounds here are like the ultimate kitsch effect to render the proceedings less-than-heavy, even as the words forebode a new age when the whole notion of urban dwelling has become a kind of last-gasp rally for people with nothing left to lose. This album is like playing pinball during the apocalypse. But when you only got a quarter in your pocket, how the hell you gonna get across the Hudson? This kind of urban nightmare scenario manifests itself most emphatically on the tumultuous “Man from Nantucket,” which reiterates the heavy industrial overkill of the opening cut, this time in the form of an oppressive organ riff that wouldn’t have sounded out of sync on a Deep Purple or ELP album. Amidst the steeling wrench of the techno sputter Tris barks out a paean for not only post-9/11 relief workers (“bring sandwiches for the boys to work late”) but also the politicians whom he refers to as “whores” for “pressing the flesh with the poor.” |
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But that’s only the beginning—his righteous indignation (the hallmark of all troubadours) reaches its most vivid apex on the aforementioned “Another Public Service Announcement,” the closest thing the album has to a traditional folk-song, in which Tris, to the tune of a strumming acoustic, understated drumming, and subdued synth, waxes apoplectic against “jerks from the burbs” who come into Union City and toss various debris onto the roadside and walkways. But Tris doesn’t only take a philosophical stand on the issue, as so many troubadours who won’t put their money where the mouth is, would do, but vows actual vigilante-style retribution: “Hey that’s a pretty classy ride/I’d like to ask you why/If you’re so smooth/You dumped a full cup of coffee/Out the passenger side/Mister if I ever see that car again/On the avenue/I’m taking out both headlights/And your windshield too.” “The more you think the more you know the more you know the less you know the less you know the better you feel…” sings Tris in the cataclysmic closer, “Philos2K,” another soulful rocker that burbles with hyped-up keyboard effects to create a boatrocking Eno-style climax. What he seems to be saying is the whole New Millennium defies logic and increasing survival is all we have. So keep your eyes on your back, even as you’re walking down the Boardwalk popping yer gum to the tune of the snappy songs on this album. Just don’t throw it on the ground when your done or you might hafta deal w/ this bucko. What would Curtis Sliwa say? |
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Joe S. Harrington lives in Portland, Maine. He likes owls.
Photo by Jon Reisbaum Respond to/insult joe directly.
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3 Poems by Ken Cormier |
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AND RUBBER SKIN BUDDHA SITS PLAINLY ON EGG SHELLS
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Disguising the fact that his payments are late And the laundry is piling up higher than Crosby Drunker than priests on a day full of masses Kept like a virgin and cut like a razor Bloodied up sheets and a head full of bourbon Lighter then darker then absolute nowhere Stuck on a hook in a bucket of bait Children in heavy coats crouched under windows Big twitching mandibles splashing in bathtubs Savory chicken breasts stuffed with no sympathy It's time we get packing and head for Tibet Croutons and apricots tossed with the laundry Women with duffle bags walking home wet The stomachs of salesmen digesting their paychecks It's time we get packing and head for Tibet |
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ON A SERIOUS NOTE |
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With vodka we bloat
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SITTING ON BUILDINGS |
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We're sitting on buildings here!
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is an ELIS EIL recording artist. |
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