LO-FI GRANDNESS AND AN EMO OPUS

TYBS#8 (JAN 2007)

Your boring desk jobs and surprisingly uncreative creative jobs can leave you with a sense of frazzeldness and general woe. For a cure I always turn to good music or good art.

Here are two records forged from polar opposites of the sonic spectrum (one minimalist and back to basics, the other over the top and full of excess) that nevertheless share unrestrained originality, vision and method musicianship. At times dark and brooding, always entertaining, these are truly good buys. God bless both of them.

PRANK SINATRA
Footlong Players
(D Chord Records)
While many critics may mistake Prank Sinatra’s sonic creations as mere novelty songs, these trivial ears miss the point completely. Prank does not make music simply to make people laugh or smile, his rough gems are intentionally made so to cater to a back to basics motive.

It’s a grassroots aesthetic shared by his low-fi idols like Guided By Voices, Dinosaur Jr. and Boss Hog. If you’ve listened to his previous album, The F Defect, then you’ll be prepared for the adventure in sonic fun that is a Prank Sinatra album.

Prank Sinatra, by the way, is a one man band in the person of Iman Leonardo, the same guy who played bass for local goth forerunners Dominion for about a decade. For his songs he recruits top caliber musicians like Czandro Pollack (Sugar Hiccup) and sound engineer Ron Francisco.

In any case, for Footlong Players, Prank has dropped the garage purity shtick and opted for a thicker, more electric sound. The resulting music is a mix of psychedelic pop and garage punk if it had been played by some very stoned Beatles.

“The band has no fixed genre,” says Prank/Iman. “I hope the second album conveys that.” As a corollary, we can also take that to mean these musicians are some of the most versatile and skilled in the local scene.

Anyone who doubts that Prank can play conventional rock should check out the flanger-tinged goodness of “Glorify DIY.” In between the samples of commercial spiels is an irresistible melody pushed even deeper by a chorus of voices doing the “la la la” bit. It only has a single phrase lyric, but it feels like a whole song.

“The album is so titled because we all ate footlong hotdog sandwiches after recording,” quips Iman. Hmmm, that would probably explain all the food references. Check out “Yesthurling Egg” and “Prelude to Footlong Midnight Snack” for some frolicking, lost in space sounds.

But the deepest hit from the bong here is the triad of songs: “I am the: a) Center of the Universe b) Illustrious Orbiting Noneffervescent Star c) Mother of all Satellites.” All the letters are different tracks, slightly connected like a prog song, but my favorite is the last with Iman’s voice sounding like it’s coming from underwater as it’s run through a vocal processor.

If this is novelty songwriting then this is the most well crafted and seriously unserious kind of mass pablum I’ve heard. We need more of it.


My CHEMICAL ROMANCE
The Black Parade
(Reprise/ Warner Music )
People have laughed when I told them this is a brilliantly made album. Then again, let’s amend that to: “some music critics laughed when I told them. . .”

I can see why this isn’t everybody’s rave record, though. My Chemical Romance is closely associated with the emo movement currently in fad. While I have nothing against emo, the sheer surplus of sentiment in some bands make for subpar, merely bathetic music that smacks of mock, hand-on-forehead tragedy that’s as overacting as it is poseuristic. Pweh.

Not so with MCR. Even their previous records had the seeds of greatness in it. They were never OA just for the heck of it, their themes were spot on and synergized with the lyrics and the musicianship was always top caliber.

With The Black Parade, MCR are no longer a potentially great band. They are now an impressive band whose work stands up to greatness and wears magnificence like a cloak. Never mind that said cloak rests on uneasy, young shoulders.

While we don’t have enough space to explain what the story behind The Black Parade is (you can log on to http://www.mychemcialromance.com/) suffice to say that it’s a concept album that revolves around the main protagonist called The Patient. We travel with him as his story progresses, starting with the time he dies, thence through to the afterlife where he meets all manner of creatures both amazing and terrible. All this as he reflects on his previous life.

Mind blowing, eh? It was sometime around track eight (“Cancer”) that I realized MCR have made not just an amazing record or just a well conceptualized, well executed concept narrative in sound but also a manifesto of pain, insight and empowerment for the teenagers today. Vocalist Gerard Way and Co are trying to make sense of the war, madness and tumult around them, just like the kids today.

This is the kind of music that speaks to a generation. Just like Nevermind did. Just like American Idiot did. The Black Parade is an emo opus that uses the conventional signifiers of the genre (screams, heart on sleeve lyrics, a mix of metal, goth, grunge, alt rock and hardcore riffs) and transcends it by being masterful. I dare you to listen to tracks like “Mama,” “The Sharpest Lives” and “Cancer” and remain unmoved by the sentiments therein.

Take for example: “Well, mother, what the war did to my legs and to my tongue/ you should have raised a baby girl / I should have been a better son / If you could coddle the infection / They can amputate at once.”

What a great gift, a polaris pointer and catharsis heatsink for those who came of age in the post 9/11 epoch. Bravo, MCR.

Footlong Players and The Black Parade are both available at all major record outlets.