New Music: Von Südenfed, The Narrator

Von Südenfed - Flooded (Domino 2007)

Von Südenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions / Domino

So here's the honest truth: We could've covered The Fall's Reformation Post TLC, and this is proof that in hindsight things aren't always better. I'm glad we didn't, and anyway, critically reviewing a Fall album at this point is the equivalent of critiquing pints of Guinness at the Gravity Bar: You think the first one's good, but by the 26th you don't even know what the fuck is going on. You just know you'll have another.

But waiting it out proved to be rewarding for another, entirely unforeseen reason this time: That's where the bizarre world of Von Südenfed enters, and you can save the German cough syrup jokes, they're already played out. This is a marriage made only in old Fall fan heaven, because while lately The Fall have gotten away from their electronic forays, the one and only Mark E. Smith has been spending time with the dudes in Mouse on Mars. Here then is that collaboration, and it is something else. Imagine Varcharz with, well, a slurring English guy on the mic. Yeah, it's about what you're expecting.

Unless you weren't expecting it, of course. Those able to reach deeper into the memory bank and pull out Smith's guest appearance on Ghostigital's album In Cod We Trust last year will not be surprised by what they're going to find on the debut, two songs already up on their MySpace. A dozen tracks will litter this record all in all, and in the same way that Charlotte Gainsbourg's new 5:55 is really just her singing over Air, Von Südenfed is really just Mark E. Smith singing over Mouse on Mars. Not a bad thing, mind, but nothing totally unexpected. There, I'm already contradicting myself.

"The Rhinohead" has to be an amusing highlight in that it is positively one of the most upbeat and strange things I've ever heard from Smith (and I haven't been listening for 30 years, so I probably missed something along the way). A jumpy synth line essentially structures a Smith rant over a pop song in a grand eschewing of conventions. Or maybe it isn't. As ever, the decision is yours.

This tune right here, "Flooded," this one's more standard fare for the course. The swamped bass swivels like a subsonic siren as Smith talks up his night out fucking up the DJ or some such rubbish. Maybe Smith was the DJ? Sven Vath who? Try telling me what he just said from 2m50s-2m54s. Any guesses? After however many drinks he had, once again, it just doesn't matter. Listen to that bass enough times and your head starts to hurt. Smith is one of those guys who people will let off the hook because somehow he has not only managed to slur more words together on record than any other man in the history of music, he has also managed to score friends in much more precise places. This means Andi Tomi and Jan St. Werner, although for what it's worth... They loved him so much, there's already a second album and a US tour in the works. And The Fall are touring this summer too. Double bill? Shouldn't be too hard. Somehow, we go on loving. Madness. Maybe it's that snazzy straight-outta-'81 press kit they give us.













The Narrator - Start Parking (Flameshovel 2007)

The Narrator - All That to the Wall / Flameshovel

Now The Narrator and I, we get along okay. Always have, right back to that Youth City Fire EP in 2004. In those days my knowledge of the Chicago "scene," its legacy and its future was pretty limited. Gradually I came to learn about Shellac and everything Steve Albini ever got his grubby hands on and how that shaped the sound of the city and the country at large. Chicago's a big deal these days, but for an altogether different reason.

But let this be the first and last time you see "The Narrator the band" and "juke-house" in the same sentence together, because All That to the Wall is about as far from The Fader's favorite flavor as The North Atlantic, and if you didn't hear Wires in the Walls last year then you're missing out. I digress: What happened to that Narrator that sounded so hungry on 2005's Such Triumph? That was a band that had all the energy of a young Drive Like Jehu with a slightly twisty post-punk lean. "The Electric Slide" from that first EP had a bassline not unlike Interpol's "Obstacle 1," so clearly they were absorbing at least a little bit of influence from what was hot... But by and large, they were running their own race and with a solid label in Flameshovel were able to get some exposure.

So what happened here? The difference on All That to the Wall is both in the tangible and the intangible. Their old drummer Dave Turncrantz left during the recording of this one, so slimmed down they decided to fetch help from a few local friends. Russian Circles, The Oxford Collapse, Bound Stems... The shortlist is about that long, but the long of it is that there were eight outsiders helping the core trio of Sam Axelrod, James Barron and Jesse Woghin. Maybe all that hanging out did something to them, because no longer does this band sound like the hungry post-hardcore prodigies they once did. All That to the Wall sounds a lot like, well, an indie-rock album. It's not generic in the sense that you know who this is most of the time. Things are cleaned up quite a bit for this record, but the basic chord-plucking melodies are still there. The guitar crunch that would've been so eager to jump out of a song like "Breaking the Turtle" restrain themselves. Like Earth in some ways, this album is a lesson in conservation and in restraint. It's still got some yelping, it's still got some dischord, but really it's a good solid rock album and little more.

I don't blame the guys for not changing the world; isn't everyone else out to do that these days? But The Narrator sound like they're moving around in the space they inhabit comfortably. The epic "A Decade in Kentucky" is the album's longest song, but it's worth it with the feedback and the crashing cymbals finally leading into an uptempo punk rock song we've kind of come to expect. Don't count out The Narrator if you even knew about them in the first place. These guys aren't in a funk, they're not fizzling out, they're not breaking apart. They're just growing up like the rest of us. You can only do loud for so long, can't you? And finding those quiet moments amid the noise is part of the new-found joy of The Narrator's sophomore effort.