New Music: Marnie Stern, Bob & Gene, Glenn Branca

Marnie Stern - Vibrational Match (Kill Rock Stars 2007)

Marnie Stern – In Advance of the Broken Arm / Kill Rock Stars

Goddamn there is no better feeling than when an album completely catches you by storm. My boy George over at the wonderful promotions group Terrorbird has been going on and on about this girl from the upper east side over the last few weeks and while I absolutely trust his taste, pushing artists on his roster is what he gets paid for and that's something you can't ignore as a music director. But I gotta say, he was on the mark with this one because I'll be damned if haven't kept In Advance of the Broken Arm on repeat since it fell in my lap a few days ago. Marnie Stern is in the rare class of artists that can live in the spirit of their influences without coming off as a second-hand product of that sound. The marniestern1 MySpace page reiterates the blatantly obvious under the 'influences' tab: Hella, Orthrelm, Yoko Ono, Deerhoof, Animal C, Khaki King, US Maple, Ex-Models. Ravaging spazz-punk, off-centered art-pop, mathy post-punk, curious no wave and even a little bit of guitar virtuoso thrown in for good measure; it's all hear in it's wonderfully obtuse splendor and Stern not only embraces each but adds her own fingerprint as well. The avant-garde rock stylings of Orthrelm and (most obviously) the guitar-drum schizophrenia of Hella are the two closest points of influence and not just because Zach Hill is acting as producer, drummer and flesher-outer. Stern, while still developing her own unique style, has completely embraced the Mick Bar, Spencer Seim and Don Caballero brand of manic finger-tapping and fractured approach to guitar playing, and she's pretty fucking impressive at it. With Zach Hill behind the skins, you get pretty close to Hella 2.0 but Stern's femininity sends her album spiraling off into Sleater-Kinney/Melt Banana/girls-fucking-rocking-out-and-blowing-your-mind territory. And perhaps most surprising with the genre at hand, Stern has got an impressive voice that can quickly jump from a subdued elegant pop croon to a snarling high-pitched yelp. Teamed with her off-kilter, fragmentary lyrics, she is able to keep every song dynamic and unpredictable. "Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch that Basket!!!" is really poppy, catchy and fun despite the gnawing guitar (a technique Hella has perfected) while "The Weight of a Rock" leans toward the avant-garde with seemingly stream-of-conscious drum clatter and Sterns processed voice. In Advance of the Broken Arm is fun, capricious and vibrant, and it can please everyone from the riot grrrls to the avant-metal heads to the art-pop kids. It's going to be most exciting to see how Stern progresses though as she continues to develop her songwriting and guitar playing, and it would be especially cool of she teamed up with some of Hill's many compatriots for a completely new project. But for now it's time to hit the repeat button yet again and listen to Stern try to both emulate her influences and discover a sound all her own; as she reveals in "Logical Volume": "This is my Thunderroad / This is my Marquee Moon / This is my Orthrelm in tune / This is my love for you."






Bob & Gene - Gotta Find a Way (Daptone 2007, orginally Mo Do 1968ish)

Bob & Gene – If This World Were Mine… / Daptone

At the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo, NY was a bustling city growing exponentially thanks to its geographic location at the eastern end of Lake Erie and the critical Erie Canal junction. They had an ever-increasing number of steel and grain mills that attracted immigrants and workers from all over the US and even was the first American city to take advantage of hydroelectric power thanks to nearby Niagara Falls. Everything turned sour though in 1957 when the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals that allowed ships on the Great Lakes to completely bypass Buffalo, opened and almost 50% of the population headed elsewhere for work. The majority of the industries shut down and the city never bounced back (interestingly enough, it’s one of the two American cities with a smaller population in 2000 than 1900). Obviously enough, a poverty-stricken Buffalo circa 1967 was not the most fertile soil for growing a music scene so whenever a group gained popularity, they promptly headed to bigger markets, i.e. Darrell Banks and Jimmie Raye heading to Detroit. There was at least one man who was determined to cultivate the scene though: singer, saxophonist, factory worker and neighborhood favorite William Nunn. In an attempt to help steer the youth of his area away from trouble, he built a studio in his basement and joined the leagues of the many independent soul labels popping up by the dozen during those years; Mo Do Records (ahem, “I’m broke, I need some mo’ dough”) was born. 50 Orange Street quickly became the place to be for the youth of the Fruit Belt neighborhood. Like most labels being dug up today, Mo Do put out a small number of singles that played well over local radio but as quickly disappeared into obscurity; Nunn was forced to close the doors by 1971 for financial reasons. Of the Mo Do acts, one group seemed destine to break out, but came up just short of putting out their first LP. The duo of Bobby Nunn, William’s son, and Eugene Coplin put out a number of 45s recorded in the Orange Street basement between ’67 and ’71 that easily made them the most popular teenagers in all of central Buffalo. Dug up and remastered by New York soul music historian David Griffiths, this collection of twelve pop-soul tunes may not have had a significant impact on the entire genre of R&B music, but is individual, fun and worth your listening time. Building on an early funk and soul foundation, the teenage pop of Bob & Gene is a combination of the adolescent R&B and doo-wop of Frank Lymon and the Teenagers, the burgeoning smooth Philly soul of The Delfonics and the danceable Chicago soul of The Five Stairsteps. Being in their mid-teens, it’s certainly not a surprise that love is the subject of concentration or that they are copping a lot of the nuances from the bigger acts of the day (James Brown, Otis Redding, Motown). I actually dig the young, unpolished songwriting on cuts like “Gotta Find a Way” and their Marvin Gaye-inspired political shout-out “Somebody’s Doin It (War)” that really make the Bob & Gene sound one in it’s own. Then again, it has the opposite effect on a song like “It Won’t Go” when the falsetto never really can find the right pitch. As a whole, I definitely see the merit in releasing the full-length compiled for the first time thanks to the always dependable Daptone Records, though it does lack some of the jaw-dropping exoticness of re-releases put out by Numero Group or Now Again. Like just about all of the Buffalo musicians, Bobby Nunn eventually left Buffalo (Gene Coplin went into the ministry and still calls the City of Lights home) to continue his career in music. In fact, he helped mold the sound of hometown hero Rick fucking James! As well, he won a Grammy for his work with Earth, Wind & Fire member Philip Bailey and started his own independent label CCEG. Sadly though, William Nunn, the driving force behind all of this, passed away before seeing this album finally released.






Glenn Branca - Harmonic Series Chords (Atavistic 2007, performed 1989)

Glenn Branca - Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses / Atavistic

Well I had every intention of reviewing this first "official" release of Glenn Branca's thirty-minute piece from 1981, but the always amazing Dusted Magazine reviewed it just yesterday. Not that us Audiversitarians are so competitive that we just toss CDs aside when someone else beats us to the punch, but Dan Ruccia's review is so detailed and conclusive that anything I write would just be a sad rehash of his fine work. So rather than a futile attempt at it, I am just going to point you in the direction of his review and bow down in respect:

Dan Ruccia's Dusted Review

However, we are able to post a sample mp3 to go a long with it, so I have included the throbbing orchestral piece "Harmonic Series Chords" performed in 1989 that is tacked on to the end of the disc. Enjoy.