ONE CHORD WONDERS

aMINIATURE Depth Five Rate Six CD (Restless)

Those of you who read last week's FM will know why I briefly considered changing the name of this column to "Ringing Burt's Bell." Since nothing really rung my bell this week, though, I decided to put off the name change for at least another week, after which time I will have forgotten all about it.

Slightly better news is that for the first time in several months, there's a new ROCK record--not a "pop" record or a "noise" record or an "artsy, but it's got a backbeat" record--that's actually exciting and challenging to listen to. aMINIATURE have clearly heard a lot of Big Black and a lot of Replacements--there's one song, "Featurist," on this disc that wouldn't sound out of place on the 'Placemats' LET IT BE LP. But the best analogy for aMINIATURE's sound is a defunct Richmond, VA band called Honor Role, who combined continually off-balance, polyrhythmic bass and drum work with very simple guitar attacks and half-spoken, half-sung, half-muttered grumblings about life, the universe and high school. (Yeah, I know that adds up to three-halves of a vocal line. When I'm in this kind of mood I tend to let these things go.) Almost all the best noisy bands still around (Frances Gumm, for example, or Circus Lupus) are indebted to Honor Role in some way; aMINIATURE, who are one of the best, are also more indebted than most. The guitar sound on Depth Five Rate Six is thicker--"grungier," if you will--than Dinty Moore's Beef Stew, thicker than you get on most metal records, and a total contrast to the painfully thin sound Honor Role cultivate. The bass and drums, though, come straight from the Honor Role fakebook--together, the parts of the rhythm section generally seem to be lurching sideways, trying to steady themselves, and at the same time rolling inexorably and menacingly onward, like a Mack truck with a very drunk driver.

The result, not to put too fine a point on it, is aggressive, cathartic and constantly changing rock and roll. When non-"rock" elements get slipped in for a few seconds at a time, the songs are even cooler than that: "Physical Climber," for example, keeps the heavy groove described above going for several driving minutes before shifting into a pseudo-classical ride up the notes on the necks of two guitars; the total contrast between the new prettiness and what came before it becomes the whole point of the song. Lyrics on most of aMINIATURE's songs are muttered or hoarsely shouted to the point of venomous unintelligibility, which only means that whatever's being said gets eclipsed by singer John Lee's captivating way of "saying" it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Lee had swallowed a distortion pedal sometime around puberty--there's more noise bound up in his voice than there is in most beat-up old amplifiers. And when he's got something to say, it's even better--"Towner on the B-Side," for example, seems to be a song about insecure people trying to infiltrate themselves into scenes in order to get a sense of self-worth from their new acquaintances: the "did it feel good/ when it felt good" that opens up each chorus comes off, you'll have to take my word for this, as the angriest possible way imaginable to mock the poor guy the song is trying to mock. Another high point is "Zero in Trust," which was also aMINIATURE's first single last year. There may not be another record this good that rocks this hard for a while--one reason for which might be that everyone more talented or more experienced than aMINIATURE has given up on big guitar attacks, and prefers to make mulit-genre, multi-weird-instrument concept albums, like this next one...

EGGSTeen Beat 96 Exploder CD/2xLP (Teen Beat)

If Depth Five Rate Six was a collection of (similarly) good, (slightly) off-balance, (very) rocking individual songs, Teen Beat 96 Exploder is that rarity of rarities, an album that you'll have to listen to AS an album. There are superb, symphonic pop songs--we'll get to them shortly, don't worry--but they fade, at first, before the brightly ridiculous concept of Exploder as a whole--it's got an intro ("Eggs Teen Beat 96 Exploder Go!"), an outro ("Eggs Teen Beat 96 Exploder Bye Bye"-- the same minute-long set of pounded-out chords as the intro, I think) and a break in the middle ("Eggs Teen Beat 96 Exploder How're Ya Doing?"). Just to be sure you'll remember that it's a specially-constructed, thought-out double album, the CD has three minute-long silent tracks called "Side divisions," so that CD purchasers will experience the same interruptions as if they had to get up and turn over or change a vinyl record. "Side 2" opens with an instrumental, "March of the Triumphant Elephants," in the course of which its initial clunkiness (cheesy digitized organ sounds, Casioesque drum-machine beats, etc.) gradually gets transformed into something close to actual triumph. And a few other numbers--notably "Music Without Keys NO. 1 and 3"--ofter the same kind of instrumental, non-rock, tourde-force delights. More important, they cement your, or at least my, sense of Teen Beat 96 Exploder as one enormous work of art rather than ass a collection of 8 to 20 disparate ones: singling out all the great songs here won't tell you all you need to know about why this Eggs record continues to amaze me, any more than describing how much fun "Good Vibrations" is to listen to would tell you why Smiley Smile is such a good album.

But singling out great songs is what I'm here to do. So. "A Pit With Spikes" (a simpler version of which came out late last year as the "advance single") is a witty, sad, reticent boy's version of a romantic breakdown: he begins by telling a girl that their future is up to her, and ends in a swoon of self-accusation: "A pit with spikes is what I'm bringing you, hon.../ I'm not so deep that I can't be swum..." There's also a incongruously, startlingly cool falsetto bridge where head Egg Andrew Beaujon sounds exactly like Prince (with a temporarily funked-up backbeat to match). "Why Am I So Tired All the Time?" and "Evanston, IL" are quiet, slowly oscillating incarnations of post-teenage despair, as if a male lounge-jazz singer were suddenly infused with the authentic spirit of the late Joy Division. "Conchita," which I think is a plain old love song (though it's real hard to tell), does all the work of a classic Tin Pan Alley composition on only two chords at a time, shifting back and forth between 'em in a way that Versus, if you've heard of Versus, very much wish they could. "Salsa Garden" has nothing to do with salsa, except that the whole song almost drowns under a thick "sauce" of sound effects and Beatlesque backwards drumbeats.

Moreover. Eggs were already kinda sorta well-known for their oddball instrumentation--live, and on their previous records, Rob Christiansen some-times plays bass, and sometimes instead plays trombone. But that's nothing compared to the "Day in the Life" style piling up of styles and timbres on this album: a smoothly anachronistic analog synth (could it be a Mellotron?) pops up in several songs, and so effectively each time that by the end of the 66-minute Exploder opus you'll probably have moved from wondering how anyone could use a Mellotron sound on a rock record at all in 1994 to wondering why that sound doesn't crop up on every new indie release. The post Pepper pileup reaches its peak on "Saturday's Cool," which may be the most excruciatingly self-concious "underground rock" song I've ever heard: the breaks in between the verses are note-for-note or word-for-word quotes from the songs Eggs listened to ten years ago, meaning not cool obscure postpunk records but Blue Oyster Cult's "Burn Out the Day" and the Who's "Baba O'Riley." And all those quotes are integrated into a genuinely moving song, another one of Beaujon's studies in extended teenage self-hatred: it's hard to remember how the lyrics go, because they're so deadon that they're painful to hear. I'd say that "Saturday's Cool" was the true "Day in the Life" for the hip teens of the '90s, but it might be truer--and more embarrassing--to say that, with all its self-obsession, its orchestration and its segment-by-segment squeals and whispers, it's a '90s "Bohemian Rhapsody." And if THAT doesn't make you run out and purchase Teen Beat 96 Exploder, you are well and truly lost to the oversuspicious, cynical minimalism that will damn this generation, if anything does, permanently and without respite. I admit it: this record rung my bell. Next week you, and I, will get to see if the new Pavement CD does too.