PLAYBACK STL Play by Play
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deliver a hurried pitch about those little piece of shit toys that were supposedly cooler because they were tinier than normal Matchbox cars? Now, remember him as the teacher in an episode of Saved by the Bell when he’s lecturing and Jessie Spano’s pencil is sending out a distress signal, working so hard to jot everything down? Assuming you have the barest minimum of an understanding about the speed at which an auctioneer works, you’ll be able to grasp this little conceptual exercise. We have to agree that the world’s fastest talker is faster than an auctioneer, but we must concede that an auctioneer would seem to have quite a slick tongue were he without any competition from someone in the Guinness Book of World Records. That auctioneer speaks very fast, just not fastest. Exercise over. Duluth, Minn., luminaries Low (guitarist/ vocalist Alan Sparhawk, his wife and drummer/ vocalist Mimi Parker, and bassist Zak Sally) are reverse auctioneers on their seventh record, The Great Destroyer. But it’s having come from being the antithesis of the world’s fastest band that they arrive at their new pace, slightly sped up, but in no right even mid-tempo. They’re simply slow, but not the slowest—as they’ve been on every one of their records since the band’s inception in 1993. They find time to get a little friskier, as they do on tracks like “California” (why every band needs to write one song about that state is still beyond me) and “Step,” but remain steeped in the slowcore that’s been a significant part of their career. “Death of a Salesman” summarily details the thoughts that must go through the heads of every lifelong group that falls just outside the big-muscled, grandest scheme of importance. Sparhawk mints the hesitant acceptance of friends and family to an endeavor as financially unstable and possibly unrewarding as being in an indie rock band when he sings, “They all said the same/Music’s for fools/You should go back to school/The future’s in prisons and math/So I did what they said/Now my children are fed/Cause they pay me to do what I’m asked,” behind a naked acoustic strum. It’s the kind of modest degree that wanders throughout the breadth of The Great Destroyer as a general credence—spectacular in its averageness. —Sean Moeller M83: BEFORE THE DAWN HEALS US (Mute) The sun recedes below the horizon and the city springs to life, propelled by the night. Phillip has locked himself in his room. He
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spent the day surrounded by peers; now he wishes to escape. He lights a candle, grabs a pencil, and begins to write. “In the Cold I’m Standing” laces the thoughts purging onto the page, and the bliss of solitude unlocks his stifled creativity. Jonathan rolls down the windows as he waits for the light to turn green. He hits the accelerator in his father’s car en route to pick up his friends, only remembering to turn on his headlights at the sight of a vacant police car. It’s the first summer since he got his license, and with nothing to do but cruise, he lets the air whisk his hair around and kicks up the volume, introducing the drivers around him to the synthesized layers of “Teen Angst.” Nathan sits alone at a bar. He can’t remember how much he’s had to drink, but it’s enough to make the taxi ride home a lonely one. An androgynous couple sings a simple ballad evocative of Julee Cruise’s Roadhouse performances called “Farewell/Goodbye” from a tiny stage. With a tear in his eye, Nathan stumbles to a pay phone. Lauren exchanges smiles with her friends while the DJ spins “Don’t Save Us From the Flames.” As the lights flash around her, she thrusts her arms into the air and moves her hips with seductive sweeps. The theremin’s whistle cuts through her, leaving her grooving body to exist only in the context of the music. Andrew’s head is spinning. His legs collapse beneath him, and he decides he needs to meet some new people. The deep bass pound of “Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” escapes the main room of the party, hitting him like a sledgehammer across the forehead. As the song washes away into a wall of static, his friends find him half conscious on the bathroom floor. The ambulance lights are the last things he remembers. Alex keeps her eyes shut to feign sleep. The arm cradling her close feels warm and strong, but thoughts of the argument keep her awake. She can tell he’s asleep by his breathing pattern, which hums to the subtle pulse of “Slight Night Shiver.” Love was made, erasing the hateful words, but her bitter emotions linger as she waits for morning. Katherine slaps the snooze on her alarm for the fifth time, cutting off the repetitive
waking bursts of “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun.” She realizes her day will have to begin sometime. Rising out of bed, she prepares herself for work while the alarm strikes again; she lets it ring as she leaves her house to assimilate into the tedium of the daytime, waiting every second for the sun to drop and her life to resume. —Aaron Richter MANIC STREET PREACHERS: THE HOLY BIBLE (Epic) I used to be into tortured artists. I found them fascinating in that carwreck way, but I’m over it. I can believe the cliffs of insanity drop down further than I want to go; I don’t need to prove it to myself by watching how others tumble over the edge. Did Richey Edwards fall? Was he pushed? No one knows. After he wrote the lyrics and played guitar for this Manic Street Preachers’ release in 1994, he vanished and hasn’t been seen since. The mystery might have fascinated me once, but not anymore. Now I’m just glad the lyrics are largely unintelligible. Perhaps he knew something I don’t, and if I did know it, perhaps I’d want to disappear, too. Empathy has its limits. Luckily, Edwards’ bandmates aren’t afraid of catchy. Maybe the British penchant for overeducation extends to their attitude toward musicianship: They learn what needs to be learned about melody and rhythm and song structure. What other country has so much pop that rocks and so much rock that pops? This element of essential Britishness makes the Manic Street Preachers more tolerable than their gloom ’n’ grump American counterparts. Lead guitarist/vocalist James Dean Bradfield may be singing, “Gorbachev—celibate self importance/Yeltsin—failure is his own impotence” (on “Revol”), but the riffs just make you want to jump up and down. Most of the songs stick with you with their varied, but all masterful, songcraft. “She Is Suffering” goes for gentle pain; “The Intense Humming of Evil” goes Kraftwerk for the Holocaust’s sake. Epic has chosen to release The Holy Bible in the States for the first time in a “10th Anniversary Edition”: Two CDs revealing how continued on page 28