Remember when music had regional traits? You know—Chicago Blues, East Coast Swing, Seattle Grunge? Yeah, me neither. No one reading internet music criticism does. But you can imagine, yes? It’s kind of cute. Exciting, for the sort of person who loves over-precise analysis of pop-culture artifacts. Which I totally am not. In any case, I’ve got some good news for you. There is now a recognizable regional trend underway. We’ll call it Los Angeles Complain.
LA Complain has a lot of exciting peccadilloes, but my favorite is that it’s imitation-proof. It can’t be consumed like Brits absorbed the blues or hat-wearing dorks embraced swing. The secret is... no one wants in on this one. We are talking about a completed and unified aesthetic of whining.
Now this band. The Ear the Eye and the Arm, they’re called. They love complaing. That’s the impression, in any case, their album Paths gives. But I think we can dig a little deeper into the world of LA Comp. Because, really, only their lead singer bitches. Their guitarist, Darin Green, is some kind of finger-mutant on brain drugs. But fuck, man. That singing. It’s like halfway between Hot Hot Heat and Linkin Park, only less self-aware. It’s like the lightest little hint of lounge singer, which indicates a secret desire to be English, which indicates a not-so-secret desire to die, which indicates being from Los Angeles.
I burned most other examples of LA Comp out of my memory with clean air, sunlight, and exercise. But I think we can safely include every pop-emo hit you’ll ever hear (produced, if not born, in LA) and some embarrassing but decent stuff up to and including Beck. The last genuine contributions LA made to music are called hair metal and Tupac. The difference between those two and The Ear the Eye and the Arm is that those self-obsessed bastards distilled LA’s LAness down to its absurd oil-slick soul. Shit, Steely Dan did that too. But if this is what LA is composed of now, I guess we can give up on another GNR or NWA. Or maybe it’s just the dudes who move down there, as opposed to the ones who relocate to Austin, Portland, New York? Hard to tell, harder to worry about.
All this is bumming me out, though, because the guitar-work on this album is alternately heavy and weird and I dig the crap out of it. This Darin Green doesn’t nail every opportunity (far from it—when he plays rhythm there’s way to much opportunity to listen to the singing) but when he plays lead, either intricately or head-bangingly, it’s well worth a listen. And to his credit, Green even manages to murdalize on the mid-tempo songs. To be clear, mid-tempo songs blow. If you’re going to rage, scorch earth. And if you’re going to emote, balladeer away, bro. But this gently insistent, carefully arr....I can’t even make myself write about this stuff. What in the world is the point of these songs? But here I am, kind of digging the lower-key moments on this album. Actually, the mid-speed tunes are far and away the most successful. I am thinking in particular of "Paths", "Playing the Martyr" and "Dialect of an Angry Man", which do not suck. Especially guitar-wise, of course. But the complaining also works at that speed. At the end of Dialect, the lead singer even screams. Lets it rip. Crazy, I know. But they put echo on it like they’re embarrassed of it and then the moment is over.
These guys aren’t even from LA—they’re new recruits. But they’ve absorbed the sound (and, one assumes, the sky-poison) of their adopted abyss. I have this irrational, over-generous desire to score this album as a resume for the guitarist. And based on the first 20 seconds of the first song, it’d be an 8.6. Killer riff, followed by some edge-of-fun weirdness, followed by chiming mellow chords. But then in come the drums and the singer and it’s the grand entrance of shame-faced, oblivious Los Angeles.
The drumming by JD Knotts is solid, but I’m told he’s just filling in, so let’s hope they can find a replacement with a persuasive singing voice. Calling Don Henley.
1 comment:
I must (by necessity, or out of obligation or something like that) take offense to your anti-LAness. I was trying to think of something that I could comment on that would invariably sing the praises of LA. But I always struggle in defending it. I always fall back on "well we're just cooler than you because we don't give a shit" and then make some meandering claim about style or "California as a cultural epicenter of America." I think that I can justifiably defend Santa Barbara against most attacks because there is real substance around there (and Ojai) that happens to be juxtaposed alongside mountains of nonsense. Here's the thing: LA (and Santa Barbara to some extent) is not a place where anything is actually created, per se. This come to fruition there. There is no inspiration in So Cal. Established thoughts find their expression in LA. That's exactly what a movie is, with the script and actors and director; the final product is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg doesn't start in LA. This is what makes LA so bizarre and contrived but at the same time so inescapably important. No good band will ever come from LA. LA is infinite transition. Maybe it is just the undaunted force. I don't know.
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