Q&A
SONIC REDUCER
Mom, I Think I'm Eclectic.
The Gits! Compay Segundo! Circle! Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash! Lipswitch!?!

by JOHN GRAHAM
and ZACH DUNDAS
jgraham@wweek.com
zdundas@wweek.com

The Gits: Seafish Louisville
(Broken Rekids)

Confidential to whomever murdered Mia Zapata: You can kill the body, but the spirit survives. This concert testimonial from the '93 Hype! docu show at Rckcndy captures the Seattle punks in fine form, Mia's raspy acts of vocal catharsis coiling around barbed-wire guitar like a snake hissing and waiting for its chance to strike. While the phrase "live recording" burns the heart with an acid sadness--given that Zapata would be dead mere months later--the band's passion shines beautifully through, making Seafish Louisville nothing less than life-affirming.

Compay Segundo: Las Flores de Vida (Nonesuch)

It's over. The Cuban music craze spun from Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club all-star project and the accompanying Wim Wenders film slowly fizzled over the last year. Ask anyone who's recently tried to book a big-ticket Cuban artist, even one of the Buena Vista boys, in the same rooms they packed two years ago. The yuppies have their Ibrahim Ferrer discs and their table for two at Pambiche--and they're moving on. (Brace yourself for the coming West Timorese soul fad, or whatever.) If Compay Segundo's lightweight latest is any gauge, perhaps it's just as well. The BVSC guitarist is an elegant player, no doubt, but this album is redundant at best and silly at worst. Segundo's last album, Calle Salud, actually pushed the Social Club's retro style in interesting directions, emphasizing son's African roots and pagan lust over BVSC's weepy romanticism. Las Flores, on the other hand, often comes off like lite Tin Pan Alley fare playing as the credits for a Woody Allen film roll. The song in French is a weak gimmick, as is the gimcrack Louis Armstrong impersonation mucking up one track. Finally, how many interminable versions of "Guantanamera" does one world need?

Circle: Andexelt (Tumult)

The Finnish freakmen of Circle are lucky they don't live in America. In this alleged land of the free, musicians frequently get beaten up, down, inside and out for daring to do what Circle does--sailing beyond genre horizons without so much as a note to let us know where they're going. Europeans, however, can boldly go on boundary-smashing expeditions like Andexelt, which mingles space-invading progressive rock with midnight-sun drum circles and astral jazz fusion. Repetitive guitar figures spin around an axis of syncopated percussion. Invisible voices mutter ghost poetry in invented languages. Pianos and flutes flutter around the edges. Weird, and sometimes irritating, but certainly not your dad's prog-rock. Call it the hypnotic offspring of Neurosis, Chrome and Can, bred in a country where the sun rarely shines and Russia's eternal winter is only a frozen breath away.

The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash:
Walk Alone (Ultimatum)

Say, fellas, you gonna call yourself something as sassy and presumptuous as "The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash" (I mean, Jesus Christ...), you're gonna have to be a whole lot tougher than this. Ah, this is a pretty damn good country record, actually. Nice two-step beats, sweet runs on the lap-steel and good, deep singing. Man's singing, yes. Songs about knives, the Interstate, truckstops, Memphis women and the Texas sun--very nice. Makes you wish Nashville was putting shit this good on the radio instead of all this mawkish, potboiling crap about Dale Earnhardt. (On the subject of which, by the way: Yeah, he died, but it's not a tragedy; babies blown up by mines, kids starved in the street, 12-year-olds prostituting themselves--that's tragedy. Death happens when you drive 190 miles an hour, sometimes.) Where was I? Oh, yeah, you Bastard Sons. It's a solid record, fellas. Jukebox fodder in a perfect honky-tonk world. And I know that JC himself is said to be "cool" with your appropriation of his mythos. But from where I'm sitting, you'll need to pump some iron before you can even pretend to tote his jock, let alone his name.

Richard Devine: Lipswitch (Schematic)

A dark, dizzy trip across the corroded underside of the Information Age's gilded exterior. A static-spurting and glitch-interrupted march of distorted and defiantly undanceable beats. A dirty, unpredictable and strangely enticing bit of arrhythmic experimental electronica. Lipswitch is all these things, and it cuts abruptly through the datastream's unceasing flow of hype and efficiency--which is just what it, and the electronic music world in general, needs. Take the sharp left turn and investigate this crooked path away from the mainstream.