Under the Influence of Gang of Four

In the “Suggested Discussion Questions” at the end of the paperback edition of Never Mind the Pollacks, Neal Pollack asks, “Aren’t you tired of every goddamn New York band naming Gang of Four as one of their influences? Have you heard a Gang of Four song? What does it sound like? Because I honestly don’t know.” When I read Never Mind the Pollacks (which you should really read if you love music at all. It’s excellent), I had no idea what Gang of Four sounded like, but I had heard of them because some other people said they were important. Never one to take someone else’s word for it, I thought maybe someday I could get around to finding and listening to a Gang of Four album.

As luck would have it, Gang of Four decided to grace the world with a new album this year and NPR, dirty liberal socialists that they are, allowed me to listen to it for free. It’s called Content and, having listened to it several times now, I can see why lots of bands would name Gang of Four as an influence. There are some good bands and plenty of terrible ones that sound kind of like what I hear on Content. On highlight “Who Am I?”, singer Jon King asks, “Who am I/ when everything is me?” and it strikes me as one of the most relevant lines on the whole album. At this juncture, Gang of Four is surrounded on all sides by bands that they inspired and, for better and worse, Content doesn’t push the envelope at all, meaning that it is basically indistinguishable from the music Gang of Four has inspired since 1977. At its best, your friends will mistake it for a Blur or Franz Ferdinand record; at its worst, your friends will mistake it for an Incubus album. If you’re wondering what the “for better” is there, it’s that I imagine Gang of Four fans will enjoy this album just fine, although, like Neal Pollack, I honestly don’t know. I heard somewhere that Entertainment is the seminal Gang of Four album; perhaps I’ll look into that and report back to you later. But perhaps I also won’t. Because it would have to be a pretty significant improvement over Content to change my mind about Gang of Four.

Content is certainly not a bad album, musically speaking. But it’s still pretty hard for me to understand from listening to it what makes Gang of Four so goddamn important. If I heard these songs on the radio, I’d probably change the channel but, if there was nothing good on the other stations, I’d probably settle for this stuff. There’s some mildly exciting guitar playing on the album, the best of which sounds like Modest Mouse or Franz Ferdinand. Mind you, I’m not accusing Gang of Four of somehow ripping off bands they themselves influenced (did Gang of Four influence Modest Mouse? If not, why not?). I am suggesting, with ample evidence in my favor, that some of the bands inspired by Gang of Four are now making far better music than Gang of Four makes. I’ll take Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight over Content any day and I’ll take No One’s First and You’re Next over both of those albums (also, by the way, Modest Mouse, you could release a new album this year if you really wanted to. I’d be excited to hear it).

Basically, Content comes to the level of being tolerable FM radio fodder and never gets any better than that. There are a few decent lyrical quips here and there, found on songs like “Who Am I?” and “I Party All the Time”, but there are some embarrassingly cheap rhymes too, like the ones that open “I Can’t Forget Your Lonely Face” (they’re not worth repeating here; just imagine the sort of rhymes that Dr. Seuss would reject as too juvenile). Another problem: the more I listen to Content, the more I think that it’s not nearly as substantive as Gang of Four would have me believe (“A Fruit Fly in the Beehive”, with its constant chatter about “proof of life” comes off as if it wants to mean something, but the more I unpack the lyrics, the less it means. I guess a fruit fly in a beehive is technically proof of life, but so is my dog and Gang of Four didn’t bother writing a song about her). Many of the individual songs are repetitive, which adds up to a pretty repetitive album (but being repetitive never really counts against you on the radio). But I think Content really completes its shark-jump around “It Was Never Going to Turn Out Too Good,” which features Jon King (a pretty good vocalist, in all honesty) basically doing a duet with a robot. That song, though brief, takes a tolerably mediocre album and pushes it dangerously close to Suck Town.

Of course, it could just be that I missed the boat on Gang of Four. If I had gotten in on the ground floor with them, perhaps I’d be more charitable towards Content. Yes, maybe if I’d been alive and as into music in 1977 (when Gang of Four started) as I am today, I could revere this band the way so many others seem to. But, if I may be permitted to argue with myself for a second (because, let’s face it, I have the time), I don’t think that’s really the case. You see, there are plenty of bands that I love that got together prior to 1977 – hell, the Stooges had formed, made three albums, and disbanded by then. And, if you’ve read this blog even once in the nearly three years I’ve been writing it, you might have figured out that the Clash is one of my favorite bands of all time; and they were also just getting started in 1977. No, I think it’s just that I don’t care much for Gang of Four.

But I hate to leave a question unanswered. So allow me to restate and provide my best possible answer to Neal Pollack’s three-part question: “Aren’t you tired of every goddamn New York band naming Gang of Four as one of their influences? I would be if I payed attention to that sort of thing. Bands will say anything to a) sound important and b) get laid. Have you heard a Gang of Four song? I’ve heard several now, actually. What does it sound like? It sounds like the best things about Gang of Four can be found in albums I already own.

If you have a better answer, I’d sure like to hear it.

The Extremely Long Soundtrack of Our Lives

The potential pitfalls of the double-album are well enumerated throughout music history. Sometimes you get The Wall or, if you’re very lucky, London Calling. Other times, you get the last Beyonce album or – dog help you – Stadium Arcadium.  So it’s treacherous territory, even for bands as talented as The Clash (I know some of you are thinking that Sandanista was their big stinker double album, but you’re wrong – it’s their big stinker triple album; with the help of Winamp or a similar player, you can whittle it down to the length of London Calling and make it a pretty good listen).

“So,” you might be thinking, “why the hell would a pleasantly mediocre band like The Soundtrack of Our Lives want to foist 90 minutes of music on us in this here 21st century? Haven’t they heard I Am Sasha Fierce?”

Those are good questions, dear reader. From the reviews I’ve read of TSOOL’s Communion, the double-album in question, I start to get the feeling that the reviewers, daunted by the sheer size of the task, have scanned the tracks once or twice before muttering a tired “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” and scampering off to digest some eight-song indie EP or to circle jerk about Wavves some more.

But not I. I’m the crazy fuck who actually listened, track by track, to Chris Cornell’s Scream album. If I could do that, I can certainly wade into the deep waters of Communion. And I did. And they’re not, as I suspected, that deep.

The central question here is, “Can an album suck even if none of the songs really suck?” Of course it can. This leads us to Chorpenning’s Theory of Tolerable Mediocrity. I submit to you, dear reader(s?),  that a certain amount of mediocrity is tolerable in music (it’s never “good” because that would make it something other than mediocre). That is, there is truly good music (Neko Case) and there is truly terrible music (My Chemical Romance) and in between, there are myriad degrees of quality and unquality. For example, if Oasis or Coldplay come on the radio, I don’t get pissed about it. Those are two distinctly mediocre bands, not good enough for my praise, not bad enough for my scorn. (Chris Martin is, however, worth singling out because he’s such a fucking goon) Don’t care what they’re all about. On the other hand, if My Chemical Romance comes on the radio, I fly into a rage. This is because My Chemical Romance is one of the worst bands ever; they make the listener a worse person for having heard them. If I could fight the entire band, I would. Seriously, fuck My Chemical Romance. Where was I? Oh yeah – the point is, there’s mediocre stuff that I don’t much care about and then there’s all the other stuff.

You might’ve guessed by now that I think The  Soundtrack of Our Lives is a mediocre band. You’re partly right: sometimes, they creep up into “Pleasant Enough” or even “Pretty Okay.” But that doesn’t excuse the bloated mess that is Communion. Part of what makes something mediocre tolerable is brevity.

TSOOL is at their most Oasisy on the album opener “Babel On,” which even features shouts of “Come on!” on the chorus, a trope that Oasis is contractually obligated to use at least once per album. Oh, and “Babel On” is nearly six and a half minutes long. So they start out their bloated mess of an album with a bloated mess of a song, but it lets you know what you’re in for. If you’re rocking out to “Babel On”, you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Communion. But, as I did on the Obits record, I found myself checking my watch half way through the first disc – and I don’t own a watch.

There’s a sense that TSOOL is trying to go for something Big and Meaningful on Communion, but there’s not really anything in the lyrics that articulates it. It strikes me more that they had 24 songs and didn’t feel like cutting any of them out. As I alluded to earlier, none of the songs on Communion are terrible, but none of them really reach out and grab you either. The first track I even nodded my head to was “Flipside,” the Kinks-aping song three tunes deep on the second disc.  That’s the song that climbs up to “Pleasant Enough” but it’s the 15th of 24 songs, and that’s too long to wait for something I can get on the first song of Vetiver’s Tight Knit. Oh, and all the songs that follow that first song.

All in all, Communion is bloated ogre of a mediocre record (it’s mediogre, which would be a pretty awesome name for a band) from a band that did much better for itself on its 2005 release Origin, Vol 1. If you’re a diehard Soundtrack of Our Lives fan, I guess you’ll be fine with Communion, but you know what I’ve never seen? A diehard Soundtrack of our Lives fan.