I can only assume that associating an album with a particular moment of time is a collective experience. Sleater Kinney's The Hot Rock encapsulates the fall of 2000, Creeper Lagoon's Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday will forever trap me in the winter of 2002, Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News might as well be a bona fide transporter stuck on the spring of 2004. Setting aside the apparent affinity for seasonal album association in even-numbered years, the formula for this phenomena is pretty damn predictable - obtain an album and play it relentlessly, almost to the point of physical dependence. Whether because of the ipod, the emergent tendency to download songs or merely a sustained period of insulation from new music (there was something of a dark ages for me between, say, Cat Power's You Are Free and The Kill's Midnight Boom) , it had been a while since I'd experienced that kind of obsessive temporal association with a record, until this summer's Rearranger from Mates of State. I adore this album. It's cohesive, it's uplifting without being sappy and there's a mythology to the production of something pretty but not (totally) simplistic that maybe makes you think married couples can consist of two intensely creative people in a way that provides a helpful alternative to the Sartre-de Beauvoir model that I personally find so unlikely. Or intimidating. Or debilitating. So thanks, Mates of State, for providing a model marriage and producing an album that I can presumably use for some time to transport me back to this past summer, which is becoming ever-more necessary as the cold progresses and the temptation to cocoon myself in Elliott Smith's From a Basement on a Hill (winter 2004!) threatens to ensure a low-level melancholia. Rearranger goes on the list of temporal transportation, which consists of records that matter not so much because they're brilliant (although some of them are) but because they illustrate, for me, the extent to which a relationship to an album (or band, or song) is so malleable over time. I wasn't ready to love Kid A when it came, but now I'm much closer to getting it. My affection for Pretty Girls Make Graves was much shorter than I would have thought, given my initial wave of obsession. Like books, musical artifacts come in and out of your life in weird and unpredictable ways. But even when an album that is perhaps not so great comes to be entwined with a particular period of time, it is perhaps more useful as a (psychological, emotional) time capsule, even if not as a representation of musical mastery.
Girl In A Coma are the greatest band to enter my world in many years, and have provided me with the most transcendent concert experience I’ve felt in nearly a decade.
What? How? I will answer that question as simply as possible in a minute, but let me first start off this piece by reminding you of how I don’t review bands in the traditional sense, but rather I’m eternally on a quest to find the heart of this thing we call music, and why exactly it does for us what it does. Go here.
Aside from being completely moved by their music, what I love most about GIC is that they know exactly who they are and perform as such, unabashedly. They are one of few in this day and age who truly get it. And by getting it, they are doing just about the opposite of every other new “great” or “successful” band that continues to roll out, only to be forgotten for the next fad. You see, each and every time I hear about the “next great band” I delve in, only to enjoy, but not feel completely moved by it – eventually to simply forget about them. This is a pattern that has been going on for too long. So many bands that impress, but fail to come full circle: Yeasayer, Battles, !!!, Black Kids, Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Fiery Furnaces, Cat Power – all the hipsterati, albeit the dated ones. (You get my point?)
So why do you continue ignoring them? From the onset, I believe it is because you hear their Moz meets Joan Jett sound and immediately categorize and shelve them. Sure, this comparison cannot be ignored – it was Joan, after all, who signed them to Blackheart records upon hearing a rehearsal, and Moz did indeed hire them to replace an opener. I’m also seeing the trends – popular music is currently controlled by the most futile, formulaic bullshit since Limp Bizkit. Even on the metal end, this emo-thrash that dominates MTV2 is quite awful. What we’re eternally left with is the hipster world, which clearly focuses on either bands that have an unheard sound that prevent them from coming full circle, or an uber-hip aesthetic of something retro; sincere without being sincere. That said, you’re still missing it.
“And I will save - and I will save all my words for someone who speaks my language so clear.”
Perhaps this explains everything properly, as Nina exclaims in their tribute to Jeff Buckley, “Vino”, from their current release Trio B.C. I am quite the Buckley admirer, yet I had no idea they felt the same when I first stumbled into GIC some time ago - in an odd, random shout-out by Latina magazine, the equivalent of a Spanish Marie Claire, yet nonetheless I owe it so dearly for changing my life for turning me onto these women. I’ll never forget that first moment I plugged into “Clumsy Sky” from their first album Both Before I’m Gone, the moment I heard the perfection of pure blood reincarnated; the moment I was reminded I was not alone in this world, as being someone who “speaks the language”, if you will…
We continue to search out for this unknown thing that we found within the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, even Amy Winehouse, the latter being a ‘lost one’ – yet we continue to refuse to understand or embrace it. The years that have followed have created this eternity where it is so avoided that we’re left attempting to worship Bon Iver and the like, yet deep down when we look in the mirror we know the sad truth. This thing all of these life-changing bands have in common is their absolute nakedness; their unashamed attack, right in the face of the world that would normally laugh at them, yet now worship them. To delve into this would take an entire book, but it is quite indeed the exact thing that causes these same geniuses to melt down and possibly commit suicide (Buckley, Cobain, Winehouse?) and/or put up the blinders to save themselves (Yorke/Vedder).
Purity. Nakedness. Bleeding.
Think of them as early Radiohead. “Creep” - I watched them encore a punk-rock version of Creep that was much better than anything I'd ever expect of Thom, considering the steps he’s taken to distance himself from the MTV years. When Radiohead came out, I honestly saw them as a tawdry imitation of U2, despite loving “Creep”, and honestly, that's exactly what they were, which is probably why Bono still hates them, as well as why they all spend so much energy attempting to distance themselves from the fact, never playing anything from 'Pablo Honey', albeit rarely at best.
So here we are with Girl in a Coma. The hipsters will write them off, perhaps because they have major label support, perhaps because they don’t understand their specific brand of cool, but honestly because they’re being true in a false world. They're not trying to be cool, they are simply doing what they do. More importantly, and the very same reason we’re in a void of great bands nowadays, they’re coming from the true depths of love and pain, just like the greats you remember that no longer exist. While there are a few bands that come to mind presently on the same tip – most notably Regina Spektor, the Arcade Fire and the Twilight Sad – all of these bands are quirky, to say the least. And they also (Regina excluded) seem preoccupied with fitting into their hipster acceptance.
I realize the jaded would automatically place them into the "all-female" category. Here is where they differ:
my problem with the majority of "all-female" bands is nothing more than agenda. For too long, here is how "female-fronted" has played out - psychologically speaking, something atrocious happened to you, and you’ve never been able to overcome it - to the point that you start your all-female band. You become political and serious, eventually spending much of your time on why men are the inherent evil in the world – how women can do just as well, if not better. I don't disagree. Look, I love a lot of bands like this, but not in the same way; they’re simply hung up on their own agendas, missing out on the ultimate beauty in life. As important, creative, and inspiring as it may be, I simply can’t fully embrace the ultimate fault that is their specific hatred toward the world, as I cannot understand it. Apologies riot grrls, but I'm a sweet guy that loves women and doesn't fit into your 'schism', so to speak.
Call me the hopeless romantic. It sucks to be here, but I am.
This is where Girl In a Coma rise above everyone. There are no agendas, no ostracizing, nothing of that sort – they don’t preach, it’s as simple as that. They simply are the real deal, doing what they love, as themselves. Perhaps this is why they’re not the biggest band in the world today, although if I ruled they'd be up there...
I’ll be painfully honest with you all. I’ve only ever been completely moved to tears by a live performance twice in my life. Never having seen Buckley or Radiohead, but then again, I’ve never seen almost all of my ultimate heroes. The first time I ever cried during a live performance was back in 2000, at Carnegie Hall. The young man I was there to see was none other than Pandit Ravi Shankar, and within several minutes his notes were reshaping my entire existence.
Not to insult those who understand Ravi, but I cannot begin to put them in the same realm, but that’s not the point at all. The point is that they alone brought it out in me again, several weeks ago at the Knitting Factory. Yes it is a different level, but it is the same principle – that of the absolute. The pure, naked bleeding I mentioned above. While Jenn and Phanie rock the fuck out in their own distant worlds – never attempting to strike a pose or look cool – there is Nina, in a trance, reminding me of a cross between Kurt, Jeff, and Mike Patton – that soul which is entirely possessed and encapsulated within herself, emitting the beacon of absolute truth we all possess, all the while emitting it as an angel from above with the voice she’s been blessed.
This young woman rips my entirety to shreds with every breath, as she should with you. The tragedy in it all is simply in the fact that I had to hide this, as I noticed that a few of the spectators nearby, in the largely gay crowd, were indeed making fun of me, which raises an entirely new set of questions to be asked at a later date. The fact that I broke down transcended weakness - it owed much more to pure beauty and hope than anything I've felt in recent years.
Allow me to draw another comparison, if I may. GIC are the modern-day Misfits. Yes, I said it, the Misfits – simply without the aesthetic need to impress you.
What were the Misfits, really? They were simply a group of true misfits, never fully appreciated until their demise. They embraced the angst of punk rock, that of being true outsiders, yet could not shed Danzig’s painful reality of the absolute – he was so infatuated with his versions of truth – those being the likes of Elvis, Roy Orbison and such - yet they were torn between the two worlds, in the exact similar manner as GIC. To embrace beauty, despite being so pissed off for being so misunderstood. This remains the ultimate quest, it seems. It remains entirely too complicated to fully embrace what is within, so we must mask it with at least a hint of abrasion. What everyone who loves the Misfits or Danzig realizes, yet never embraces, is the simple fact that he is indeed pouring out his soul, or 'crying', if you will. This is what all of the greats do, yet we're incapable of accepting or embracing it - always to shielded in protection, in avoidance, in fear of being hurt.
Yet being hurt is what 'it' is all about. Asi Vida.
These women are the perfect example of something we all believe to be dead, and that is the hope for the future. They are my current hope for humanity in this world of short attention-spanned idiot technological snarkers.
They are so good you must embrace them on your own, with an open, vulnerable heart - as these words cannot begin to bring justice to how I am truly impacted by them.
