Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after almost a quarter of a century of a collaboration between free-thinking Texas-born musician, theorist and teacher Mayo Thompson, who’s traded under The Red Krayola name for more than forty years, and Art & Language, the 1986 Turner Prize short-listed conceptualist art collective whose dense, persistent line of critical inquiry has proved equally rigorous. Both parties had threatened this year to finally record and release Victorine, a long standing operatic project, the libretto of which, concerning a French policeman who mistakes the nude figures in paintings by Courbet and Manet for a serial killer’s victims, was published more than 20 years ago in the collective’s ‘Art-Language’ journal.
As it stands, this new set, with lyrics and texts by A&L veterans Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, scored by Thompson, and played impeccably by a Chicago super-group featuring Jim O’Rourke, Tom Watson, Noel Kupersmith of the Chicago Underground Trio and Tortoise drummer John McEntire, is a far cry from the harsh, social-realist music hall of their 1976 virgin outing, ‘Corrected Slogans’. Then as now, though, Thompson’s dry drawl takes a back seat to his collaborators, though the plummy tones of A&L’s English enclave heard on that album may well have been too shrill a product of their times.
Because, as Thompson clearly realised by 1981’s ‘Kangaroo’ album with A&L and another super-group culled from artists associated with the Rough Trade record label he’d become so integral to, intellectual quirks and charmingly off-kilter rock n’ roll subversions sounded even better with the double bluff of a female voice, which softened the edges without ever losing them.
So on 1980 single, ‘Born In Flames’, the jaunty, Baldwin/Ramsden/Thompson soundtrack to Lizzie Borden’s science-fiction feminist film of the same name, Essential Logic vocalist Lora Logic sounded positively, euphorically unhinged. Equally, ‘An Old Man’s Dream’’s soaring choir girl swoon on ‘Kangaroo’ is an irresistible counterpoint to its dialectically inclined lyrics based on a German poem by Max Horkheimer, and concerning itself with Freudian psycho-analysis in a bourgeois state. Such were the contradictions of a collaboration which made it as far as 1983’s ‘Black Snakes’ album, but, so cantankerously fractious was the state of far Left thought back then, had even been founded on schism after A&L members spoke out against Thompson’s 1970 solo record, ‘Corky’s Debt To His Father’, provoking Thompson to challenge them to come up with something better.
Today, Thompson’s vocal foils are Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang. Both singers appeared on the 1999 RK album, ‘Fingerpainting’, with Randazzo’s involvement with the band dating back to 1996’s ‘Hazel’ (on which, co-incidentally, A&L’s Michael Baldwin also made a cameo). Yang was drafted in while still an under-graduate at Pasadena’s Art Centre College Of design, where Thompson still teaches.
Randazzo is a member of Fairechild, the LA based band she leads with her partner Josh Schwartz in-between designing clothes for her Dusty Of California label, which she named after Dusty Springfield. Randazzo has played viola with Spiritualized and The Charlatans’ singer Tim Burgess, though given that her father and mother are Teddy Randazzo and Victoria Pike, who scored hits for Little Anthony And The Imperials and saw Dionne Warwick turn their song ‘Goin’ Out Of My Head’ into a classic, her vintage rock n’ roll lineage is undoubtedly adored by Thompson.
Randazzo and Yang’s presence on ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’ kind of resembles the rolling downtown loft-dwelling personnel who shifted in and out of view in Anton Fier’s 1990s project, The Golden Palominos. Especially during that band’s broodingly smoothed-out period when Lori Carson and Lydia Kavanaugh shared sighs-and-whispers style vocal duties over Fier’s foreboding burble of programmed rhythm.
Here, though, the musical framework is sparser and the delivery looser, so Randazzo and Yang’s voices come at you from a distance, playing it straight without realising the out and out silliness of some of what they’re singing about. So while they may be referencing Rabelais on ‘Laughing At the Foot Of The Cross,’ when they sing ‘Oh, You Need A Mitten/To Catch A Kitten’, it’s kindergarten sing-song refrain only makes clear this song is about a feline shitting itself through fear by the way the line ‘Fuck The Fucking Cat’ is so un-self-consciously and hilariously deadpanned, as if being read off a lyric sheet for the first time. Especially as the song is wrapped up in a melody that’s a dead ringer for The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin.’
Elsewhere, there are understated shades of Chicago’s The Sea And Cake (a band who McEntire also plays with) and, on the thrillingly sarcastic ‘The Big Vacation,’ low-key jazz guitar stylings of Linder Sterling’s equally provocative 1980s combo, Ludus, whose stop-start existence ran oddly parallel to that of The Red Krayola, and has recently been watered down via the Nouvelle Vague vogue for covering Punk classics in a latin style. On ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars,’ this approach is the sucker punch for some very serious discourse coursing through each of the album’s 13 bite-size, deliciously constructed narrative reflections, as the mini-commentary which accompanies each set of lyrics in the CD booklet gives the game away for.
Lyrically, A&L’s preoccupations are more playful than those of old. The revolution, while far from over, has shifted away from pure ideological polemic to something less po-faced and not so concerned with toeing some Maoist party line. As Thompson himself pointed out in an interview in issue 6 of Map, the attempts to set socialist philosophies and revolutionary discourse to music on ‘Kangaroo’ “was a miscalculation. If it was a strategy to reshape the language and revolutionise the times, it failed signally.”
Mirrors are everywhere on ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’. If on The Red Krayola’s wonderfully sublime 2006 album, ‘Introduction’ and its follow-up EP, ‘Red Gold’, Thompson cut a gnomic Dr Seuss-like dash, here he’s Mayo – and Mike, Mel, Charlie and all the rest of the crew - through the looking glass. Or, cut through the Malapropist word-play of ‘Hostage,’ a trick repeated on the closing title track, its bombed-out and shattered remains.
On album centrepiece, ‘Four Stars: The Ideal Crew,’ where Randazzo and Yang are in full possession of all the prick-teasing whininess of The Waitresses ‘I Know what Boys Like’ if that particular valley girl anthem had been laced with art theory venom, even Thompson’s pounding piano embellishments can’t prevent Art & Language proving at length just how anti pretty much everything they are. All wrapped up in such prettified apparel as it is here, ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’ puts cleverness and conceptual negativity into pop in a way that, like the slow-dance-at-the-hop-caught-shortness of ‘Perfection,’ sounds exquisitely if nastily out of time.
Unedited version of a text published in Map Magazine, October 2007
ends
As it stands, this new set, with lyrics and texts by A&L veterans Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, scored by Thompson, and played impeccably by a Chicago super-group featuring Jim O’Rourke, Tom Watson, Noel Kupersmith of the Chicago Underground Trio and Tortoise drummer John McEntire, is a far cry from the harsh, social-realist music hall of their 1976 virgin outing, ‘Corrected Slogans’. Then as now, though, Thompson’s dry drawl takes a back seat to his collaborators, though the plummy tones of A&L’s English enclave heard on that album may well have been too shrill a product of their times.
Because, as Thompson clearly realised by 1981’s ‘Kangaroo’ album with A&L and another super-group culled from artists associated with the Rough Trade record label he’d become so integral to, intellectual quirks and charmingly off-kilter rock n’ roll subversions sounded even better with the double bluff of a female voice, which softened the edges without ever losing them.
So on 1980 single, ‘Born In Flames’, the jaunty, Baldwin/Ramsden/Thompson soundtrack to Lizzie Borden’s science-fiction feminist film of the same name, Essential Logic vocalist Lora Logic sounded positively, euphorically unhinged. Equally, ‘An Old Man’s Dream’’s soaring choir girl swoon on ‘Kangaroo’ is an irresistible counterpoint to its dialectically inclined lyrics based on a German poem by Max Horkheimer, and concerning itself with Freudian psycho-analysis in a bourgeois state. Such were the contradictions of a collaboration which made it as far as 1983’s ‘Black Snakes’ album, but, so cantankerously fractious was the state of far Left thought back then, had even been founded on schism after A&L members spoke out against Thompson’s 1970 solo record, ‘Corky’s Debt To His Father’, provoking Thompson to challenge them to come up with something better.
Today, Thompson’s vocal foils are Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang. Both singers appeared on the 1999 RK album, ‘Fingerpainting’, with Randazzo’s involvement with the band dating back to 1996’s ‘Hazel’ (on which, co-incidentally, A&L’s Michael Baldwin also made a cameo). Yang was drafted in while still an under-graduate at Pasadena’s Art Centre College Of design, where Thompson still teaches.
Randazzo is a member of Fairechild, the LA based band she leads with her partner Josh Schwartz in-between designing clothes for her Dusty Of California label, which she named after Dusty Springfield. Randazzo has played viola with Spiritualized and The Charlatans’ singer Tim Burgess, though given that her father and mother are Teddy Randazzo and Victoria Pike, who scored hits for Little Anthony And The Imperials and saw Dionne Warwick turn their song ‘Goin’ Out Of My Head’ into a classic, her vintage rock n’ roll lineage is undoubtedly adored by Thompson.
Randazzo and Yang’s presence on ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’ kind of resembles the rolling downtown loft-dwelling personnel who shifted in and out of view in Anton Fier’s 1990s project, The Golden Palominos. Especially during that band’s broodingly smoothed-out period when Lori Carson and Lydia Kavanaugh shared sighs-and-whispers style vocal duties over Fier’s foreboding burble of programmed rhythm.
Here, though, the musical framework is sparser and the delivery looser, so Randazzo and Yang’s voices come at you from a distance, playing it straight without realising the out and out silliness of some of what they’re singing about. So while they may be referencing Rabelais on ‘Laughing At the Foot Of The Cross,’ when they sing ‘Oh, You Need A Mitten/To Catch A Kitten’, it’s kindergarten sing-song refrain only makes clear this song is about a feline shitting itself through fear by the way the line ‘Fuck The Fucking Cat’ is so un-self-consciously and hilariously deadpanned, as if being read off a lyric sheet for the first time. Especially as the song is wrapped up in a melody that’s a dead ringer for The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin.’
Elsewhere, there are understated shades of Chicago’s The Sea And Cake (a band who McEntire also plays with) and, on the thrillingly sarcastic ‘The Big Vacation,’ low-key jazz guitar stylings of Linder Sterling’s equally provocative 1980s combo, Ludus, whose stop-start existence ran oddly parallel to that of The Red Krayola, and has recently been watered down via the Nouvelle Vague vogue for covering Punk classics in a latin style. On ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars,’ this approach is the sucker punch for some very serious discourse coursing through each of the album’s 13 bite-size, deliciously constructed narrative reflections, as the mini-commentary which accompanies each set of lyrics in the CD booklet gives the game away for.
Lyrically, A&L’s preoccupations are more playful than those of old. The revolution, while far from over, has shifted away from pure ideological polemic to something less po-faced and not so concerned with toeing some Maoist party line. As Thompson himself pointed out in an interview in issue 6 of Map, the attempts to set socialist philosophies and revolutionary discourse to music on ‘Kangaroo’ “was a miscalculation. If it was a strategy to reshape the language and revolutionise the times, it failed signally.”
Mirrors are everywhere on ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’. If on The Red Krayola’s wonderfully sublime 2006 album, ‘Introduction’ and its follow-up EP, ‘Red Gold’, Thompson cut a gnomic Dr Seuss-like dash, here he’s Mayo – and Mike, Mel, Charlie and all the rest of the crew - through the looking glass. Or, cut through the Malapropist word-play of ‘Hostage,’ a trick repeated on the closing title track, its bombed-out and shattered remains.
On album centrepiece, ‘Four Stars: The Ideal Crew,’ where Randazzo and Yang are in full possession of all the prick-teasing whininess of The Waitresses ‘I Know what Boys Like’ if that particular valley girl anthem had been laced with art theory venom, even Thompson’s pounding piano embellishments can’t prevent Art & Language proving at length just how anti pretty much everything they are. All wrapped up in such prettified apparel as it is here, ‘Sighs Trapped By Liars’ puts cleverness and conceptual negativity into pop in a way that, like the slow-dance-at-the-hop-caught-shortness of ‘Perfection,’ sounds exquisitely if nastily out of time.
Unedited version of a text published in Map Magazine, October 2007
ends
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