Iran (Vulgar Tango)

I used to have this on CD but 'upgraded' to the LP, which comes with a bonus 45 rpm 10", recorded about a year later and having zero presence on the usually infallible discogs.com. Iran are a group I know essentially nothing about except I received this to review for something, as a CD back in the early 00s, and always liked its warped, art-rock approach. At a time when I was looking to both drone/minimalism, textural approaches to composition, and collage material such as The Faust Tapes, it seemed to tick a lot of boxes. No one would ever describe Iran's sound as 'precise', but it's not a giant mess either. There's not a total abandonment of guitar-based indie rock, clearly their roots, but they were obviously looking to push forward beyond that sound. There's noise without chaos; tracks like 'Radio Galaxy' revel in static, hiss and its variable possibilities, but stay aware of space, time, and pace. 'The Music Plays Itself' (found on the bonus 10") continues the interplay of radiowaves and guitar, on a bed of tremolo and with some delicately expressed singing for just a second before a wave of thicker buzzing takes over. Though the guitar playing in 'Sailors' sounds like someone falling down the stairs, it's herky-jerky for good reason, and the various layers of buzzing guitars, static, and electronics throughout it (and other tracks) all seem to be there for a common purpose. It's not a kitchen-sink band, but rather a band that was seeking a way out of the easy disharmony of the spacey jam. We get flavours of genres - 'Spherical Cockpit' is one such example, a deconstruction of anthemic guitar post-rock, which by '98 when this came out was already pretty tiresome. Here, the chords build up, but there's zany synth sounds challenging the rigidity, like a shortwave radio broadcast of Mogwai or something. "Deconstruction" is such an easy term to throw into music writing, and it's often used to describe approaching a song from the inside-out, but Iran is actually more about construction - about choosing layers to mean something and combine for important textural form. It's lo-fi hi-fi, if that makes any sense - there's a clear soundstage on 'Crickets', Western Avenger', and even the hissy static of 'Yellow Tiger Lemons'. When vocals are present they're often processed beyond intelligibility, adding to the overall aesthetic with just enough odd words slipping out to steer things; or in 'Goodnight, Goodnight' they're delivered conventionally but with everything else out of balance to make it a parodic pop song, and a solid album closer.'San Diego' is the shortest incursion into this direction, with crisp acoustic guitars and even ending with a clearly emoted lyric!  'Drugs' and 'DC', the 33rpm side of the bonus 10", don't appear on the CD version of this album and are rendered in glorious fidelity, with the indie/post-rock presence of 'DC' a bit like if Bedhead got taken over by a computer virus. Overall it's a great assemblage that stood a bit ahead of its time – this type of experimentation felt a bit more common a few years later, by which point Iran had moved on to their second and third albums. I'm not sure where they are now, if anywhere.

The Gerbils - 'The Battle of Electricity' (Orange Twin)

The Gerbils are pretty much forgotten now, but were pretty much forgotten when they were happening, too, at least outside of their Athens-based scene. They were dismissed as a Neutral Milk Hotel side project, one of the more obscure offshoots of the Elephant 6 thing, which meant they got lumped in with those bands just by their associations. And who can blame us? Scott Spillane and Jeremy Barnes are half of the Gerbils and also half of Neutral Milk hotel; the other two guys were certainly a big part of the Athens, GA pop scene around the turn of the millenium and the Gerbils managed to record two albums and a handful of 7"s before disappearing completely. And their sound is also pretty similar to their other bands, in that they are built around fuzzy guitar pop with some external instruments (horns, melodicas) as accents. This album is made up of ten songs with untitled interstitial tracks in between, some slow and dirgy and others a bit more spry. Vocalists Spillane and John D'Azzo harmonise in a very classic indie-pop singing style - not too gruff, occasionally reaching for low registers and helping to deliver the lyrics which are slightly dark and cynical ('The Air Up There' lyrically belies the jaunty shuffle of its music; 'Lucky Girl' is likewise more bitter than it's high-pitched, bright indie-pop cadence suggests). 'Snorkel', the title track, and 'Share Again' are a trilogy near the end, without these instrumental passages. The first of them is a slow song about going to the beach that keeps threatening to crash like a wave; for seemingly slight subject matter, it feels huge and monolithic. The interludes aren't filler; there's two in a row on side two, and they are lovely. They not only show some diverse musical influences with this limited palette (there's a pre-rock pop music feel at times, almost Tin Pan Alley, plus some funereal dirges and impressionistic sketches); they also serve to tie the whole thing together and make this feel like a proper band, despite drummer Barnes credited not with a kit but 'snare drum, floor tom, cymbal'. The Gerbils know when to step on their fuzz pedals and amp things up; 'Meteoroid from the Sun Strikes a Dead Weirdo' feels as punk as things ever get in this scene, and 'The White Sky' has some near blast beats behind it's shimmying keyboard licks and fast chord changes. The whole "indie pop" sound has been so maligned over the years, particularly by those who focus on the Calvin Johnson sweater-wearing cuteness that came out of the Pacific Northwest and all of the attendant developmental disorders that went with it. But I have a real soft spot for the bright lights of that movement, some of the 90s most memorable bands, who actually sound a lot more diverse and some, such as Tullycraft, even feel like spiritual descendants of punk. At its best, great indie-pop can convey a wistful sentiment such as  'Not a night goes by that I don't think of you / I watch you in my darkened room / Electricity was invented when I was left like this again' with a feeling of approachability, solidarity, and craft. The Gerbils had this in spades, and while it's hard to truly sonically separate them from that genre, they, like many of the best examples of any scene, stand apart.

Gastr Del Sol ‎- 'Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly' (Drag City)

'In the museum / they set up the drums all wrong / reversed hi-hat and snare' is a lyric that, when you read it here, doesn't sound so odd. But once David Grubbs delivers it with his famous diction, and perhaps in the context of the overall song ('Parenthetically', which is clearly a hissy, caught-on-dictaphone improvisation) and the overall album (the sublime, strange and still singular Crookt, Crackt or Fly), it feels fucking alien. There's a forgotten generation of people like me, mostly male I'm guessing, and white, and quite a few who wear spectacles, who felt the power of the guitar but didn't want to sound like Yngvie or Satriani in our teenage aspirations. Gastr del Sol, and in particular this LP, was like manna from heaven. I never really listened to the first Gastr album, because it didn't have Jim O'Rourke on it. But here on the sophomore record, the two are equals, dazzling in their guitar interplay but not afraid of incorporating some piano or electronics when necessary. The thirteen minutes of 'Work from Smoke' make up the Gastr piece de resistance, the masterpiece that takes you through everything they do in a short period of time: Grubbs's idiot-savant lyrics, edgy acoustic guitar slashes, and a new dawn of droning electronics that sounds like George Crumb having a go at remixing the Spirit of Eden master tapes after drinking a few sixpacks of malt liquor. If this was the only track they ever cut they'd still live in eternal greatness for me, but there's actually the rest of the album to enjoy (and a few other records, too).  Side two's monster is 'The Wrong Soundings', a combination of processed ambient/field recordings (sounding mostly like somebody fucking around in a cave or other resonant space) with some circular insanity-guitar; the first half doesn't grab you by the throat and throttle like the best parts of 'Work from Smoke' or 'Every Five Miles', but it's a key transition to Upgrade & Afterlife's more O'Rourke-dominanted moments - and then the RAWK comes crashing in, and we remember the roots of this band (or at least 2/3 of them). It's not the most cohesive track, feeling a bit like a collage of several different parts, but the sum isn't shabby. I think part of the reason this record feels so perfect is that is sticks to a fairly limited palette, being mostly acoustic, though John McEntire shows up to rock out on side 2 for a bit. Crookt, Crackt or Fly breathes a heavy gust of the avant-garde into an indie rock carcass (remember, Grubbs was the dude from Bastro!) and if there needs to be a photograph of something in the dictionary entry for 'post-rock', this is a pretty strong candidate. You can laugh at Grubbs's vocal delivery (and I often do - it's great to open your junk mail and sing it in his style), and maybe the strangeness feels affected to some, but I'm never one to mock ambition and this is bathed in it, and I think confidently achieves its goals. Maybe it's mostly forgotten by now, but the legions of crookt crackt guitar players in contemporary bands (Dirty Projectors come to mind) surely owe some debt to this. It's absolutely wonderful, and despite the very distinct tone here, I'm almost always in the mood for it.