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Maybe it was because the architects of sorrow were at it again, turning parts of Lebanon and Israel into a film set hawkishly marrying Mission Impossible III and Open City. The war of the worlds poetry of gunships and Soviet-era rockets raining and reigning as families huddle deeper into the recesses both of their homes and hearts, trying to find shelter in an age still mired and shredded by the tendencies of Old Testament bloodletting, is a hard nod to the faltering maps of our own existence.

Sunday: I was stuck in Borders, for hours, it seems, biding time until I could pick up my wife from her long-winded retail job miles north, off the freeway and had just read the political journals, written in earnest and measured in pounds of analysis, that were trying to weigh in on foreign affairs prior to 3,00 people dying in Irag last month, or Israeli soldiers being nabbed, or hell unleashed on Southern Lebanon, or a tsunami revisiting the Far East in six foot tall currencies of death. I turned to the poet Robinson Jeffers for some west coast oceanic solace, but he just let this one line dangle in front of my face for five minutes — “stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.” Truth need not be anything but brief, I was reminded.

Shuffling with headsets, I kept looking for some new music to bury me in a kind of satori, some flash of truth, some brief burst of meaning that could make me feel weightless, then Caithlin De Marrais’ voice swept down the inner tunnel of my ear, “at the end of the world/will you swim for me…” or I think that’s what I caught, or wanted to catch, a kernel to keep me resilient, or simply in the arms of hope. Writers have zoomed in on the personal sense of trials and tribulations echoed on the album, like Melissa Brown over at All Music Guide, penning, “De Marrais acknowledges that difficulties happen (or have happened) and that not much can be done but sing about them. She hasn’t resigned herself; she just isn’t taking immediate action. The opener, the made-for-stadium-anthem “Catastrophe,” talks about what the characters will do at the end of the world (“I’ve got a plan, I’m going to find you,” she sings, almost ominously), a steady drum and driving guitar propelling the song along, with De Marrais’ bass monotonously echoing the guitar line, making it very radio-friendly.” Yet, when I hear the words “I’m going to find you…” and “will you swim for me?” I could care less about the radio-friendly composite rendered by their producer in upstate New York who has handled biggies before. I just let those lines form a shell around me, a kind of promise to continue. Will catastrophe keep them together, I wonder, looking at pictures of ferries leaving Lebanon for Greece, or little boys about to jettison Beirut in a helicopter, or lovers leaving hotels under the coughs of sky sizzling bombs, or dust and debris settling on bodies turned into pummeled puppets for beliefs that no one person can get his or her head around to make the real meaning stick.

To me, the lyrics unlock something akin to Wim Wender’s “Until the End of the World,” a post-apocalyptic quest to rekindle what’s left of the human genome of the spirit since technocracy flailed us. Do we turn inwards, capturing lost cinemas of the mind, or do we turn towards the fields, the horizon, or the road stretching from under our feet, or the salt-leaden sea? As the sonic concussions rattle down the concrete avenues of Beirut, or the missiles nail another random home in Haifa, I wonder who is driving right now? And the when the flood walls, the dams, the barriers, all crumble, who will be swimming for their loved ones, and who will be standing by the flags.

excerpts…

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together

All the dams will give 
at the end, at the end, at the end, 
Of the world. 
Will you swim for me? 



And the lights can go 
at any time, any time, any time, any time.. 
How will you look for me? 

And the bridges that burn at the end,
at the end, at the end, of the world.. 
How will we cross the seas? 

And the plans have got to hold
a destination that you and I
can rely on for sure. 

I want you to find me. 



…Do you think we could go on forever? 
When the architects of the world 
are handing out the swords?

But I’ve got a plan 
I’m gonna find you 

At the end
Of the world
At the end
Of the world

…So how will you look,
how will you look
how will you look for me?

Well I’ve got a plan,
I’m gonna find you. 

I’m gonna find you 
At the end
of the world.
At the end 
of the world.

At the end 
(I’ve got a plan, I’m gonna find you)

I’m gonna find you
I’m going to find you at the end of the world.

(thanks to www.leoslyrics.com)

One part of me was reluctant to toss this in the player, feeling it would mimic the failings of “Cut the Crap” by the Clash, no, not the electro-funk gone awry, but the whole idea of reinventing basically the same band minus an important player, when sometimes the missing link becomes all too glaring, like a glitch in the fabric. Still, this is ¾ Hot Water Music under the helm of new band name The Draft, and it actually feels sonically similar to “Caution” (released by Epitaph in 2002), though with even more maturity and mid-period Leatherface yearnings (think: Minx). Although Chris Wollard’s punk-embellished side is still probably best found on his side-project The Crows (who used to cover the Big Boys, all humid hoarseness and gator-mouthed!), this slab of coated aluminum won’t alienate anyone, even HWM purists, unless they are still stuck in 1990s mode, waiting for the atonal, sea chanty-esque, hairy emo belching that made HWM’s early path a godsend to all the post-hardcore kids. In fact, this feels a little too par for the course, too over-regulated, and the “variety” espoused by the label promotion is a bit overstated. Yes, there’s some implanted ska on “Let it Go,” though it’s more like Mighty Bosstones, all gruff and skanky, not lightweight Third Wave black and white moonska high school band dork party platters. In addition, on “All We Can Count On” there is a slow churning soup of anthemic rendering, thoughtful and FM radio style, which is replayed on “The Tide is Out,” minus the huge barroom chorus calls. The edges have been rubbed a bit smooth, the approach settles down in the middle of the road, but as Wollard wails on the first track, “New Eyes Open,” it’s simply “that’s what I like about it/it’s not so complicated,” which can be over-analyzed by all the Punk Planet scribblers till they go blue in the face. In the meantime, if you were looking for melody and heartfelt hot streaks at all the right junctions, without worrying about Wollard being too self-conscious, slick, over-heated fake feisty, and caked in last millennium’s stinging sweat and beer leftovers, then this may be your thermometer. It’s not the blackout, but it’s not Foghat either.

Worth three potato chips.

Falling in line behind the continuum of Slade, Hanoi Rocks, Guns N’ Roses, Dogs D’Amour, Turbonegro, and punk-infested cock rock, these bullet-belted, skinny beanpole pants adorned, pint-swirling and lust-ridden lads belt out humungous head-bangin’ heat with equal parts snot and suss, though it tends to more gimmicky than real vitriol. “I Lose It” is the seminal sonic flame-encrusted supernova, “I see you in the park and I lose it,” all muddy roar and sexual animalism, while “Fuck it Up,” is well, anthemic and ornery, like later period Cockney Rejects without the skinhead shadows. However, the Bowie wink early on “King,” replete with strings and softness at the beginning, ends up heading right up the rock shithouse, revealing smeared megalomania. Yet, the singer attacks pop star megalomania, and its famished, fake, and clean-living bullshit on “Kill the Pop Scene,” which points its guns at “parasites of society” while extolling porno’s “X-rated dreams…” which are better than “the nightmare pop that floats on your screen.” Meanwhile, “Beaujolais” bemoans the unlikable ex-pat American grrl from “life of luxury USA,” who’s the money maker on TV, while the slower, chugging, back to basics “Start Believing” tries to outrun the feeling of losing control while the unnamed millions try to start believing again. It lacks the overall absurdity, old-fashioned bubblegum tenderness, and fractured, mondo B-movie quality of the Ramones, and the sleazy Sunset Ave. heights and sordid tattooed glee of Gun and Roses, and the mystic rock-a-rolla stage show of Turbonegro, which is not to say that tuneage like “Northern Lights” doesn’t have a British backboned, working class campiness and beat-‘em-on-the-head, restless Whiskey a Go Go dream variations.

Worth two and a half potato chips.

Politics make a hell of a lot more sense when you burn your dog-eared Lenin and Mao paperbacks and have sex until the moon falls from its chord in the leaden night.You can vote for imbeciles and party programs, or shake your ass and forge a new Internationale between your hips. Okay, that’s bullshit. But it leans more towards the philosophy of the International Noise Conspiracy more than any whiny tirades from Jello Biafra (who pooh-poohed a really good vegetarian restaurant in Sweden, says Dennis…That’s not surprising). With his vegan tattoo right above his skinny wrist and his straight-edge tattoo bolted across his baking soda white backside, 29-year-old singer Dennis Lyxzen is an old-fashioned lover of justice and human dignity, and a lover of deep embraces and wet kisses, or so I pretend. He loves the curling thunder of Dinosaur Jr. records, and was once obsessive/compulsive about Gorilla Biscuits, and still reads like a motherfucker and makes me believe that the revolution is a Palm Pilot away, no, I mean an MTV 2 video away, no, I mean right back in the MC5 testament, “You can be part of the problem, or part of the solution…” Well, damnit, he just makes me believe.

Most people think of Sweden as a socialist country.

Well, compared to America it would be. There’s some fairness to that statement, because we used to have health care, elderly care, and childcare that the government supplied, but it doesn’t anymore. So it that sense it used to be that, and in the last ten years that has changed a lot. And I think that Sweden has to adapt to the market economy that we have today, and they are totally selling out all those ideas that made Sweden a really good country to live in. I would say that it is like any other country in the world pretty much, but it’s still a little…Well, it has aspects to it that are really good, but most of that is disappearing by the minute actually.

Has the erosion of those ideas led, in part, to your political radicalism?

Oh yeah definitely. I think the first political radicalism you get into is the bigger abstract things, but then when you actually view the world around you and see it change from year to year, you see how it affects your parents or grandparents or people around you, it becomes very obvious. The first time I came to the United States was in 1996, and it’s scary to see Sweden going in that direction.  That can’t be a good thing (laughs).

Did you think the Americanization will filter down into every sector of society?

Oh yeah. I mean it’s kind of hard, because we still have a Socialist-Democratic government, but it’s not very socialistic at all any more. For instance, the right wing controls the city of Stockholm and they’re totally privatizing everything. All the rock clubs are getting shut down because you can’t afford to have them anymore. It’s the whole gentrification thing of the inner cities, like let’s have rich people live in the inner city and move everybody else out. It’s kind of weird.

Some Eastern Europeans have expressed some skepticism obout your politics, which is heightened by the fact that they lived behind the Iron Curtain for so long.

Yeah, I think that when you get into what we’re saying, our critique of capitalism is  equally a critique of the Eastern Bloc. We never said that was something to strive for at all. We talk about socialistic-anarchic ideas that far supercede the actual state capitalism that we feel they had in the former Eastern Block. But we can see them being skeptical because they have been told for so long that this is communism, and people say, oh yes, this is communism, and it pretty damn sucks, so I can see how people can be skeptical about it. But that’s not what we’re talking about. Our critique is like as much valid on labor, working forces, alienation from work, those kind of power structures, which are equally imbedded in the so-called communist cultures. It was on based on ideas that were good 100 years ago and all, but they’ve turned into instead…Well, the dictatorship of the proletariat ended up being the dictatorship of the few and as in America, the power structure serves to keep the power structure intact, not to serve the people.

Usually only around 20% of the people joined the Communist Party.
Yeah, so I can see people being skeptical, but if they sit down and read about they’ll realize that we’re in no way defending the Soviet Union or anything like that?

How did your critique apply when you went on your first tour, which was in China, and how did you end up there to begin with?

Well, we ended up going because we have a friend that lives in Hong Kong, and he was sorta joking around. He saw one of our first shows ever, and he was like, you guys are great, you should put out a record on my label. And we were joking and said, if you bring us over to China, we’ll put out a record. He said, okay, cool.

And he did?

Yeah, we were like, all right. We recorded a couple of songs, sent it to him, and he put out the record. We were there for a month, and played fifteen shows. We were the first band to actually tour China. It was really tricky to go to China as a political band. Like there are so many aspects of it.  First off, you go there and see how people are being treated, how human life is also being commodified as much as it is over here, maybe even more bluntly there, because people there labor for the government, and not for themselves at all.  So that was tricky, and we were worried, like can we actually talk about politics? It was totally illegal. Well, it wasn’t illegal to be there, because we were tourists, but we really couldn’t play there, so it was kind of illegal. Then we realized that no one speaks English, no one talked at all in English, so we were like, ugh. But I was like, well, I can pretty much say what I like because people won’t understand me anyway. We realized though that this was not going to be a tour where we talked about politics, it was an adventure and we would just play music. Then there’s the implication, or the fact, that we came over with rock music and people were really excited. A lot of people are trying to break free of the traditional Chinese culture and do something else. What you feel when you come over is that maybe they’re generally excited by us because we play rock music, but then again rock music is just another cultural import from Western culture. Well, they have McDonalds at Tienamen Square, and Dunkin’ Donuts in Beijing, so here comes rock music.  In that sense, we felt really stupid. True, we are the imperialists bringing you more of this fine American culture…

Even though you’re Swedish.

But all of us are children of rock’n’roll culture in a lot ways, so we came there and it kind of freaked us out, but at the same time hopefully people could get inspired just to play music. It was very fascinating, because being the first western rock band over there is so weird. People never ever saw five white people play punk rock before, so you could just imagine, people didn’t know what to think. We’d do a kick or knee drop and people would just start clapping, and we were like, what? We played this festival, like a rock festival, and there was like 6-700 people there at this big auditorium. So imagine us playing in front of 700 Chinese people. And there’s was like eight other punk type band from that region, people were like going crazy when we played. It was unbelievable, and we were like, what is happening here? It’s definitely like after playing music for a long time and being disillusioned with just playing music, it was really inspiring to go there and see the effect that music can have on people, and know we were there when a scene got started.

One thing you’ve said is that music and art are all image, poise, and surface, but how does that idea hold up over there?

That’s the hard thing. Our perspective on art is that it is a lot of just selling or surface, and selling or old ideas, but at the same time, we live in a post-modern society where people tend to make up the meanings themselves in a lot of ways. Take for example when you play shows. There’s going to be a lot of people that are really excited about us being a political rock band, there’s so political, cool. Then there’s people who like us because we’re a rock band and play good music and think that politics don’t matter, or is just bullshit. Or there’s a lot of people like my friends who say, everything you say and are doing is amazing, but your music kind of sucks. I think that what people extract from it is so tricky to define, especially when you come to a place where no one speaks English and you can’t really sit down and talk about the tradition of avant-garde art in Europe. People would just be like, what are you talking about? It’s really tricky, so what we tried is play music and inspire people. Though I think that music and art is very much in the line of bourgeois self-realization, I still think that it’s important to express yourself, and I think that music is still a good way to express yourself if you do it honestly and sort of really incorporate something that you want to accomplish with it. . So in that sense we still play music. People ask us all the time, why do you still play music? Well, I love to play music. Though we can all sit down and get into deep discussions about the meaning of the artist, at the end of the day I still love to buy records and play, which I think is with the post-modern condition of living with contradictions all the time. That’s something we have to struggle with on a daily basis.

Have your politics been received differently in America after Sept. 11th?

Definitely. In a way, we came and said a lot of stuff before Dec. 11th, and people who didn’t really take us seriously danced around and thought, they’re kind of funny, and they talk a lot about politics, but that’s just whatever, that’s their schtick, that’s what they do, but those people I think become more offended now than amused. I think people used to think, ah, those crazy Swedes, now people actually get more offended by it. But all in all, if you just try and approach that issue, because we talk a lot about that and try to incorporate that into what we are saying, and approach it in an intelligent manner, I think you will understand what we’re talking about and why we talk about it the way we talk about it. I mean there is some new age of McCarthyism here, which is really scary.

There’s already a blacklist of unpatriotic professors.

Yeah, yeah. It’s horrible, and I think that if you could list un-American activities, we have participated in quite a few (laughs). I think that talking about it and looking at what happened, there is a reason why the world looks like it does, and one of the reasons is that there has never been room in America for people that think differently. . And there’s always been hegemony of thinking, and I think now more than ever there’s a need to talk about political ideas and a need to talk about an analysis about why America got attacked, and what is happening in Afghanistan. I think that’s a really important thing to talk about.

At the same time, you’ve described some political bands as dystopian and unfun, so how do you not fall into that same trap?

It’s tricky. First of all, we try and step back from the idea that we have all the solutions to your problems, like here’s the party program that will save you. I think in the first initial stages that allows people to look at what we have and sort of pick out what they find is interesting. We can also be contradictory, and use a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense out of context. But for people, if they look at our records, there’s quotes from communists, socialists, anarchists, dadaists, everything. We just try and give a guide to the history of resistance, almost a small introduction to radical political ideas. It’s up to people to find out what suits them, or to say, that’s a great idea, or that’s a crock of shit. We try and lay it all out on the table and see if there’s anything you like.

That starts a dialogue?

Exactly. We don’t try to be…Well, we’re not dogmatic. We don’t really have a set of ideas. Well, we all in the band have a set of ideas we want to do, and that’s what we try and present, all these different ideas. I think that is a good start, because any time you start pointing a finger and saying, this is what we should do, then you’re already in danger of becoming really boring. But then the other thing we do is when we play live. When you get our records and when you read the manifestos, there’s definitely a kind of nerdy thing to it…There’s something like, here’s a bunch of guys and girls from Sweden who read Michel Foucault, and that’s not very amusing in itself, but we try…Well, you know what I mean. There’s definitely a nerdy element to it, like we read books a lot, and you should try and read. Coming from the rock point of view of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, that’s kind of uncool actually. We know that element exists, but if you mix that with music that we try to make very sexy, danceable, and enjoyable, and especially when we play live we want it to be more in the lines of…well, instead of being Crass, or something like that with boring political finger pointing, we want that feeling of looking in the 1970s and the Black Power movement and the bands that played the sexiest, funkiest music…

Like James Brown?

They still have the clenched fist.

But brought with it the cultural cool. You’ve said that with every recent major political movement there has been a musical movement too.

The problem now is that we have a really big political movement growing and not a lot of music to coincide with that. Our approach is to both make it fun and make people think more is to lean towards 1970s funk Black Power than 1980s Crass. That’s the kind of approach we try and have.

Is there a difference if they dance to you instead of Madonna?

Mmm, I would like to think so, but maybe I don’t really know. I think in the end it’s more fun that they are dancing to us because this band is based on all these political principles and ideas, and its always kind of fun to get people dancing and know that not all these people agree with what we are saying, but they are dancing to what we’re saying. They’re dancing to all these political ideas. In a sense, in the world that we live in today, just dancing itself may be a very liberating act. I’d love to see people dance to Madonna than not dance at all.

So people suggest that you are exploiting poets and philosophers like William Blake and Michel Foucault just to sell more records.

Of course, there’s always this idea of selling culture and selling radicalism. I mean that’s something that we know also. A lot of stuff that we include on the record is not easy or accessible enough for it to be cool. Just like Baudrillard. I don’t think you use Baudrillard as a sales point ever. We could other images maybe. We made a video for “Capitalism Stole My Virginity” and thought we thought maybe we should have footage of Gothenburg and the General Rights, and yeah, we could use that and try to get it out to people, but there’s also the risk of exploiting these ideas. Once you have Baudrillard or those kinds of things, I don’t think that anyone will be like, these guys quote Baudrillard, I think I am going to check out their record.

But does Baudrillard now become a rock’n’roll icon?

It would be kind of funny if he did. I don’t know (laughs). But any time you sell yourself to capitalism, which we do all the time, and any time you sell your art to capitalism there’s always that chance of…Are we selling the idea? We had that song, “For Sale” and that song off the last record that deals with the fact that everything is for sale. The Clash said it when they were doing all the shows at the end of their career, like here we are, just selling the revolution. In today’s society, there’s no real way of escaping the monetary system, no matter how hardcore and DIY you are. You still work within a capitalist framework and kind of sell your ideas. In a way,  Fugazi is selling the political idea to even a further extent than we are, cause their whole marketing point is, we don’t have a marketing point. Not to dis Fugazi, I think they are amazing, but when you look at it that way, that’s a very powerful sales point. We don’t sell T-shirts and we are not a commodity, so buy the record (laughs). There’s always that risk of selling and corrupting the ideas, but then again I don’t think that anything is that holy, and I don’t think that ideas should not be able to be twisted, altered, and used for different purposes. If you are a punk rock puritan, and your goal is keeping punk rock from being exploited from big business, then of course I can see you being pissed off by bands that you see selling out or bands signed to major labels. But I’m not a puritan in that sense, and I really don’t care. I think that the political ideas we have far supercede any youth culture or subculture.

Do you think that choice itself is really a myth?

Oooh. Yeah, in a sense it is. If you come to America like, it’s so crazy because there’s so much to choose from. We were trying to buy cereals this morning and we were just like, ugh.

But they all practically contain the same thing.

Yeah. Exactly. People are always like, yeah, it’s freedom, you get to choose between McDonalds and Burger King. That’s a great choice to have. We have a line on the new record that goes, “The only choice is the refusal to pay.” Because no matter what you choose, you going to fucking pay for it, that’s just how it is.

You also have the line, “The last century promised so much, and now we are outdated.” If you are so outdated, why are you doing it?

I don’t think that we are outdated, but I think that the big ideas of the modernistic plan of the one idea to save us all is outdated. In that sense…Well, that’s a very post-modern song. It deals with the fact that last century had all these, well, you had all these ideologies that were supposed to save us all, and now we look back and it didn’t. Ideology just turned into a trap for people to apply a new set of rules in their lives, and that is outdated. All the big projects went down the drain.

That is somewhat what Fukuyama states in “The End of History” when he suggests that liberal democracies have won the ideological battle.

I don’t believe in the end of history bullshit. I hate that sense of post-modernism. It’s like they’re saying, we haven’t figured out what to do, so we’re going to paint up this really bleak picture and then get on with our lives as university professors. All those post-modern writers have to come up with new theories so they can maintain positions within the university hierarchy.

It’s just another selling point?

It is a selling point, totally. Many of them even admit that they have to come up with something new so they can maintain their position within the hierarchy of intellectual thoughts, so I don’t believe in the end of history.

Is that what you mean when you’ve said, “We don’t want to fall into the trap of exploited nihilism”? Those professors are exploiting such nihilism to maintain a job, nice car, and two story home.

Yeah, definitely. And you read them. I like Baudrillard because of a lot of his points. I’m really into post-structuralism, but I think that a lot of the stuff is just bullshit. A lot of those people talk about the end of history, that there’s no real, and all these abstractions but…

In China there’s several things that are very real.

Yeah. Still here everything is real. We still have to work for eight hours a day. The power relations in our culture are still here. They might be more abstract than they used to be, but they’re still here. Most of us are still at the bottom of the pyramid. A lot of those people try and transcend that.

After you paint the picture of the problem and kids read your liner notes, what’s the next step?

What we expect is just to inspire people, like the way we got into music. Like when I got into music, I got into the Dead Kennedys and Born Against, bands that actually talked about politics, and they made me excited about doing shit. That’s why we pack our records with quotes from books, information, and addresses, so people can see this, and if they think it is interesting, and they want to do something, we can let them know there’s still tons of stuff to do out there. We’re a band that talks about collectivism, so first of all, we have to do this together with other people. The myth of the individual and the American hero is just bullshit. The system needs to be changed, and that is not going to be a pretty sight. But I definitely think that we first look at our own lives. When we talk to people we usually tell them, you have to look at your own situation, like your own culture and where you are at right now. If there’s something that you think is really important, than work with that and analyze that. Like go into a bookstore and choose a book that concerns you. You shouldn’t read Baudrillard just because I read it, you should read something that affects your everyday life. People should just start from there.  We realize that there is a big political movement growing right now and there’s stuff to be done, like I talked to some kid last night, and he was like, what should we do? I was like, it’s not up to me to decide what you should do, if you have imagine and guts, you can do a lot of stuff. We can get into the whole debate of, well, how productive is that and what do you accomplish by doing that, but part of liberating yourself from the tradition that we have is just to do it.

Without giving up the sense of pleasure and sexuality…

Exactly. A lot of times for me political stuff has been about trying to fuse a political idea with something that I enjoy doing. If it doesn’t work out, I’m like, I’ll try something else. Or that worked out really good. Sacrificing yourself to some abstract idea is just going to burn you out. I have so many friends that got into politics and were really gung-ho about it, like “I’m going to change the world,” then after two years of passing out fliers they’re like, fuck this, nothing is happening. If you are not enjoying it…Well, I’m not saying we should just have a good time, I don’t think that if the revolution is the way I see it coming, it’s not going to be a whole lot of fun, but at the same time I think it’s unnecessary to become Christian about it, if that makes sense.

This is basically a remix added re-release of a split album done with kid606, though now featuring the knob-turning handiwork of J.K. Broadwick, who has worked with Godflesh. It’s a semi-epic kind of naked and ugly concept rock, all shuddering distortion motifs and broken jazz drum riffing, which is pared down almost as far as Joy Division in a sense that it is more pregnant with tone and pacing than flickering wrists and prog rock prowess. For instance, if you, instrumentally speaking, lust for godheadsilo more than Gone, you know, something slightly laying on the back side of the beat and totemic, limber, and lunging, not succumbing to the more postured, though perhaps more adept, cinematic expressionism of Explosions in the Sky, then this is your meal ticket. It drives and drives and tumbles and stops and surges and drives more, then becomes the vortex, then becomes the vortex spillage, then becomes the spout, then becomes the eulogy for lost time and bodies…or a gray passage through time zones, earmarked by endless eddying and drifting cushioned by noise embers, like the Dead Man soundtrack by Neil Young, where just as you think things have petered out, the last comet trails have danced, or the ashes are caked in orange no more, there is still motion and movement, a reckoning of the infinite, the glory-void-hole of guitar memories. “Soma Remix Stage 2,” at over eight minutes, is a fine unspeakable (words seem to be inoperable here) liftoff to remember, mirroring each of those tendencies. Worth the whole package on its own.

Worth three potato chips.

Literally a helter skelter mélange/circus tent of style and flourish, which some people might call a basket case of half-baked outres musique, these Eastern European Slavic soulsters meets Japan avant-garde theatre rock dip into the territory, as described by their label, of Frank Zappa and System of a Down, but I would shed light on the fact that there’s Mr. Bungle in there too, and perhaps Kurt Weill, even Cabaret! It’s rambunctious, zealous, and dizzying, but in reality, I don’t think this will continuously show up on my play list, not because the Bulgarian gypsy strings and du-blat panic attack drums and super-stuffed vocals aren’t impressive, but because this is like being part of a performance that feels pregnant a few times, then similar to a raw-stitched Tom Waits record, feels a little too pressurized for constant listening. Yes, there’s a metallic beauty to “Zumbul,” a breathless and nearly capsizing drama that could outpace any Nu Metal wanna-be crue and simultaneously appeal to lovers of deconstructed opera, or Eastern European folk mysticism, whereas slightly more straight-up punk pounces on “Gino Loves You,” like a downshift in style, yet it has Pogues-like skittering instrumentation. For anyone familiar with bands nearby their original turf (well, not Seattle, from which they now hail, but homeland Bosnia and Bulgaria for some of the players) like Sunshine, or Croatian rocks bands, know that such bands deliver potent fare; still, most of them don’t venture so left field as this, where the dynamo and authentic immigrant inchoate sense of ruptured cultures feels both threatening and resoundingly resilient. If you liked Hedwig the Angry Inch not just because of the Bowie-isms but also the cabbage-strewn, post-Cold War wit and wryness, plus the staginess, then this is your over-turned cup of tea leaves, for the bold and bad-assed purveyors of the Ottoman empire’s old haunts. Hell, even Jello Biafra and Joan Baez dig them, and they ain’t no tools from the same shed.

Worth three potato chips.

Yes, next time you open a package of screws from Home Depot or some other pillar of the American knack for do-it-yourself super stores, or cheap Mexican day labor farms, look at the back, the white cardboard you just shredded in haste to make those Ikea shelves stay together longer than three months. Right there, under the company title, the mini-logo, will be the place, the mecca of such products, likely Rockford, IL, home to Cheap Trick, made famous by Michael Moore in Downsize This! (in the film, he actually hangs out with Rick Nielsen after being told by a chain store that Cheap Trick were never around). By the way, Rockford, which once voted for left wing mayors and had streets built by “reds” before a wave of disillusioned East Europeans landed in the cornfields, is also the former childhood home of Ginger Lynn, one of porn’s true old-timey 1980s video queen giants (who still shows up here and there, more plainer MILF than sun-baked girl-next-door, but insatiable in her own way), the one Charlie Sheen dallied with, much to his father’s heart-clogging dismay. Located in the former armpit of the rust belt, Rockford straddles a dirty river, a half-abandoned downtown, and miles of suburbs just a hiccup west of Chicago, measured in toll roads and former farm fields. This is defacto Middle America, I suppose, the land of Lincoln and Blackhawk, shades of Swedish pancake houses and anglicized names and current Russian white slaves and Laotian ghettoes.

I grew up with guys who strode through my parent’s basement with black satin jackets that unveiled the words “Cheap Trick” in blaring white logos. I remember going to neighbors’ homes, especially the guy around the block whose right-hand fingers were mysteriously missing, well, they were there, partly, like squiggly lumps, just another factory floor casualty, and hearing ‘Dream Police’ like a ubiquitous message from a pop rock heaven that I would soon be squashed by, forever.

However, I didn’t even own a Cheap Trick record until my 20s because I took them for granted. Bun E. Carlos would scour the record store I worked at, Appletree, looking for something to prick his ears. He had a side-project, the Bun E. Carlos Experiment, and they’d thrown down tunes like “Detroit is Burning” by the MC5, but hell, Bun E. Carlos was in a band that put out a vinyl single in Southern Wisconsin in the late 1960s. He epitomized old school, loved the Dave Clark Five, and had only sour stories of Patti Smith getting doted upon by Epic while Cheap Trick worked their asses off. Then again, he also offered up an early Patti Smith bootleg to me, so, the hard feelings must have been tempered by her piano poetry at some point. He saw the Ramones blister through Rockford (with the Nerves, in tow, if I remember correctly) at the Red Apple, out near my parent’s home and the dirt racetrack. Basically, the guy had good taste.

I made him homemade cassettes of Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, and other Northwest or Midwest stuff that was fuzzy, careening sludge-rock. He thanked me, and later on when I saw them play to thousands of hometown fans at the downtown “stadium,” where my sister had seen Blondie years before, the intro music was almost the entire album Goo by Sonic Youth. I was floored, and said, “Right on,” before my older buddy Allen passed the pot pipe. Or was that the AC/DC show, hmmm.

A few years ago, I watched their concert Silver, set besides the same river I boated in as a kid, the same river that would ransack entire neighborhoods when the flood waters rumbled, and they even brought back their mid-period bassist to sit in for their early 1980’s songs. Besides Bun E., the rest of the band were always aloof or testy or simply ducked the public. For instance, Tom lived in Madison, I believe, but Rick did run into the record shop one lazy afternoon, after the Beastie Boys had sampled their infamous Live at Budakon album intro, “This is the first song off of our new record,” yelping, “I am going to sue them!” A natural reaction, I suppose, to being eclipsed by smarmy white boy hip hop.

By the way, they have a new album, called Rockford, and last seen, were playing the Indian casino circuit. Still, don’t chuckle on your chains, I saw them with a gracious Wayne Kramer (the iconoclast from the MC5) a few years back, to a crowd of 1,200 in sweat-infested, post-Enron, big city bright lights Houston, and they were sublime, when they weren’t busking on the ‘ol acoustic version of “The Flame,” though it made some aerobic and bottle blond moms contented. Even Steve Albini (who produced their comeback kids “Baby Talk” Sub Pop single) and Tony Reflex (one of the hardcore nation former fired-up freshman turned dad from the infamous Adolescents…selected as one of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s primal and fave L.A. bands, and who in fact just played with them July 2 for Vegas Rocks 100!, and were featured on a free RHCP-stapled together Mojo sampler, the track “L.A. Girl” chosen by the Red Hots to represent the hardcore era, along with the Circle Jerks and others…), know what I am talking about: He writes in the liner notes of the 2004 Adolescents release on Frontier Records, The Complete Demos:

“I recently went to see Cheap Trick because my eight-year-old daughter insisted on seeing them. I hadn’t seen them since 1978 and really didn’t know what to expect. Their fans were wonderful – among the most courteous and embracing of any I’ve ever met, and the band was as fun as I remembered them. We stood on Rick Nielsen’s side, and he gestured to my daughter to walk toward the stage, which she did timidly – and he snapped a pick at her, and then bombarded her with twenty more. It was priceless.

As I watched, I remembered being 15 years old and gushing praise on this band, firing off multiple letters to them; receiving answers, guitar picks, bow ties. It was a magical thing – the band and the fan actually communicated. I mean it literally, I actually talked to Bun E. Carlos on the phone once on the Rodney on the ROQ show and I just blabbed on and on about another band and Bun E. patiently allowed it, sharing that he too, was a music fan.
So I stood there in Long Beach, 2004, at a night club – reflecting on how I had seen this same fine band a few blocks away at an arena 200 times the size of this club, some 26 or so years ago – and how the music and the experience was every bit as magical now as it was back then… back when I was starting a band with a guy named Steve who had a love of hooks, melodies, played bass, and loved the Beatles – and a guy named Frank who played an Gibson Explorer just like my hero Rick Nielsen did, and how this lady at the record label – Lisa Fancher – didn’t laugh at me when I asked her to have someone design a typewriter logo for my record, kinda like Cheap Trick’s, and she came back with the logo we all know today…”

So, the working class princes of pop forever shaped the pioneers of second wave US west coast punk, all hair-splitting toxic kid rock with an undercurrent of Southern Girl/Taxman/Dream Police melody milestones.

Also, the Cars have returned, sort of, now featuring Todd Rundgren on vocals, in lieu of Rick Ocasek. What’s happening these days when bands have famous migrants working with them? Like Tom Verlaine pitching in for Patti Smith off and on, and his former cohort Richard Lloyd working with Rocket From the Tombs, and even Mike Peter’s newfangled, poppier than ever Alarm, with guitarist James Stevenson from Chelsea, Generation X and Gene Loves Jezebel and bass player Craig Adams from The Sisters Of Mercy, The Mission and The Cult. That is super-group, post-punk, pop-smeared territory, ala carte. Oh, and Wayne Kramer plays with a handful of musical misfits all the time, for his MC5-esque incarnations, which have featured fellows from the Cult, Damned, and so on.

Anyway the New Cars album is live, replete with big stage sounding, slightly mutated versions of Cars standards, and Todd does, well, just fine, without Rick’s warble, though there is still a warble, but it does not have Rick’s peculiarity stamped on it. There’s two “new” tracks pasted on the end, not unlike afterthoughts, just like the new Replacements anthology, and the songs remain the same, mostly. Is it hollow memories? Mere karaoke nostalgia? Or like Sammy Hagar with Van Halen? I’ll leave that up to you slick sleuths, but I found myself smiling and nodding in approval, just so I wouldn’t have to dig up my ratty Cars vinyl records.

Touted as a kind of Norah Jones meets Patty Griffith, this is suburban SUV songster territory all the way, a kind of low-key, unblemished, saccharine music for The View crowd, folky without being folk, or topical, and washed clean by dabbling sunshine on the mind. There’s a time and place for this, I suppose, when the world is so utterly complicated that a soothing, innocuous female voice uttering (in consoling, shake’n’bake, candle-melting, miniature Zen office waterfall, therapeutic gestures) “ain’t it time we need to change” might make sense, if only bombs weren’t wailing in Lebanon and our doctors cheating us here at home. So, yes, it offers some respite from CNN, a touch of interior soul-girl reflection, white as boxed wine, but only for those who think that Joan Jett, even Alannis Morissette, is too she-devilish.

Worth one potato chip.

With a vaguely 1960’s pop undercurrent ( ala the near country-era Byrds, meets deep-throated 1990’s under-rated Crash Test Dummies) on this second album by Carbon Leaf, the band shelters under a mostly relaxed strumming vibe, produced by the fellow who undertook the sonic stylings of Lisa Loeb and Jewel. Alas, it’s a routine pop venture that would fit alongside Shawn Mullins, even Tom Petty, without much fuss, but then again, it’s not entirely forgettable either. There’s sun on faces, hearts throbbing, tears, etc., all on the first track “Learn To Fly,” so the sentimentality is flying, right off the bat. “Love Loss Hope Repeat,” with a slight flair for alliteration, has a near-talking kind of delivery, but no, no, not the Lou Reed or Leonard Cohen kind, instead it’s a very Hallmark card type. “Under the Wire” fares better, since it’s a bit thicker around the middle: the tempo pushes a bit, the drums swing, and the song is modern manish — slightly offbeat tender Nashville melodic. Like I said, there is some flannel underneath it all, a discernible streak of roots that pops up on “Royal One,” but again, you won’t mistake this band for Son Volt, even on the acoustic “The War Was in Color,” which, through the narrative spiel of a grandfather, paints a picture of war that avoids glossing over the difficult truths, since “those black and white photos don’t capture the skin…” Sure, there are lines like “bootcamp to battle,” “swallowing sea,” and “crossfire stitching up soldiers,” again, pretty heavily reliant on alliteration, but at least this approaches some kind of poetic presence of persona. Lastly, “International Airport” throws down some near-funk, and is one of the hokey tracks, barely flavored, overly air-conditioned, and way too pre-meditated for the satellite radio age, as if it is skyscraper elevator music waiting to be.

Worth two potato chips.