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Album Reviews :: U
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Crash, crash. Three more crashes. A low, moaning flute sound. More crashes, and an electronic squeal. A splatter of electric chamber music, rife with tone clusters. Dense, chromatic figuration for piano and winds. Hints of Ligeti, "L'Homme Arm," rapid scalar motion, and -- what's that -- tonality? Yes, it is. Sort of. This is the opening of U Totem's "One Nail Draws Another," a composition by James Grigsby and one of the great compositions in the history of experimental rock. In a mere fifteen minutes, it's practically a microcosm of Western music, from High Renaissance polyphony and contemporary chamber music to Broadway and rock music. Melodic, consonant vocal sections are offset by blasts of heavy, dissonant instrumental chamber rock. The music is never the same for more than a minute, and yet it holds together perfectly. Perhaps the most impressive moments are the two slightly martial-sounding sections of modal vocal polyphony, in which Emily Hay, Kaoru Mansour and Howard Shepard sing the same texts in three different languages -- an idea which may sound gimmicky or pretentious, but feels utterly right in the context of the piece. Let me back up a bit. As you probably know if you're reading this page, U Totem was a short-lived collaboration between two other groups: Dave Kerman's aggressive avant-prog outfit, 5uu's, and James Grigsby's wildly eclectic chamber group, the Motor Totemist Guild. This, their first album, alternates between compositions by the two of them, and their different but related styles mesh quite well, producing something akin to a more accessible Henry Cow. In fact, a few passages actually recall specific Cow moments quite exactly, as in the heavy, angular guitar passage towards the beginning of "One Nail Draws Another" (probably inspired by a rather similar passage in Cow's "Living in the Heart of the Beast"), the jumpy bassoon work in "The Judas Goat," or the funereal wind melody in "Two Looks at One End," which reminds me quite a bit of a section in "Falling Away." Emily Hay also sounds slightly like Dagmar Krause, although her voice is unaccented and quite a bit less strident. All in all, though, the album is too eclectic and too warm to really sound like Cow -- nor, I think, is it as good. , I have to admit,
I don't love the album as much as some people do. There
is "One Nail Draws Another," which is simply excellent.
Another highlight is Kerman's "The Judas Goat," which alternates
somber woodwind passages with wild atonal rock-outs that will
take your breath away. In fact, the "chamber" passages
have a surprising poise and delicacy that's generally absent
from 5uu's music, and I'd like to hear Kerman write more for
classical instruments. But, to my ears, the rest of the
album doesn't live up to the standards of these two songs. I
do like Grigsby's shorter pieces -- the fact that he managed
to have rock instruments playing rock and classical instruments
playing classical at the same time in "Yellow Umbrella
Gallery" (to say nothing of the wonderful use of vocal samples
even on top of that) is quite impressive. But Kerman
was, in general, not as developed a composer in 1990 as he is
now, so "Both Your Houses" and especially "Two Looks At One
End," for all their great passages, don't seem to have quite
enough material for their length, and wind up seeming a bit
repetetive. Grigsby's long finale, "Vagabonds Home," is the
most problematic; while it too contains some beautiful music,
it goes a bit overboard in the area of fragmentation and winds
up feeling kind of aimless. When he finally does get to
a conventional "melody" at the end, he repeats it for an entire
three and a half minutes, which definitely strikes me as overkill.
The result is not that the album is in any way unpleasant, but
just that it's too long. If it lost about fifteen minutes,
it could be perfect. As it is, it's merely "very good."
- Alex Temple
[February 2002] Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info  Univers
Zero - The Hard Quest (1999)I've never been a huge Univers Zero fan, but when I saw The Hard Quest in Newbury Comics one day, I decided to buy it. I'd heard that the album, their first after thirteen years of silence, showed a newfound "maturity," so I thought it might be more fluid and subtle than their earlier material. As it turns out, the album does benefit from a newfound variety of sound, but overall it doesn't really do much for me. Still, there are a few very good tracks. "Rouages" in particular stands out as quite different from much of the band's earlier work -- its stop-start rhythms and fragmentary structure recall Aksak Maboul's masterful "Cinema," and the Medieval-ish wind melodies that pop up occasionally remind me of Pierrot Lunaire (the band, not the Schoenberg piece). Unfortuantely, though, the piece isn't too cohesive, so even the best passages feel haphazardly glued together. There's also a Zeuhl influence that pops up in a few places. The martially striding "Rébus" is the best example of this, and it's pretty good, if a bit underdeveloped. In other places, though, it doesn't work so well: Eskaton-like basslines can't save "Affinité" from its obvious four-bar phrasing, and the groove of "Xenantaya" (yes, Daniel Denis wrote an actual groove!) isn't enough to hold my interest for ten and a half minutes. By far the worst moment, though, is "News From Outside" -- not for the music, which is your average mildly interesting improvised chaos, but for the utterly atrocious lyrics. Luckily, this is the only track on the album with words, because Denis's poetry contains lines like "The fire, sole source of all things, will help us separate essential elements from dross." Other tracks are pretty standard Univers Zero fare. The best of these is "Civic Circus," which is a fun and enjoyable track with very effective use of percussion and harpsichord, although, like much of UZ's work, it's so heavily Bartók-influenced that I wonder why I don't just listen to Bartók himself. Then there are the obligatory "Tête du Corbeau"-style pieces, "Vieux-Manants" and "Kermesse Atomique" -- plodding, bass-heavy things that I can never seem to remember anything about no matter how many times I listen to them. So, yeah, there
are some very nice passages on here, but nothing that makes
me really want to listen to the album very often. The
other Univers Zero albums I have, Ceux du Dehors and
Crawling Wind, have some excellent tracks that keep me
interested despite the problems I have with the band in general.
This one, though, just seems boring most of the time.
Maybe if you're a UZ fan, you'll like it better than I do --
but if you share my critical attitude towards the band, don't
bother.
- Alex Temple [April 2002] Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info  Uz
Jsme Doma - Hollywood (1993)Uz Jsme Doma's third album, Hollywood, opens with a manic blast of pounding drums, carnival organ, and shouting vocals. However, midway through the album's 7-minute opener "Koroze", the tone suddenly turns on a dime to almost ska-like guitar and flamenco clapping. This sets the tone for the entire album - frantic one minute, melancholy the next, silly the next. The remainder of the album is made up of longer tracks interspersed with shorter interludes. "Jassica" begins as a strange little piano-and-drunken-singalong ditty, before segueing into quite a nice driving, melodic saxophone feature. The title track features the only English-language vocals on the album, opening with a gentle love song verse. This verse is repeated several times, becoming more demented each time, leading into the Czech-language second half of the song. Wanek's lyrics don't seem to handle translation well ('a heap / condemned to eternity / motionless, bottomless, like foam city', whatever that means), but 'Hollywood' seems to be some sort of indictment of the entertainment industry. So I'm told. Following the pleasant multi-saxophone interlude "Vlazna A Sediva" and several other shorter tracks, the album closes with another extended track, "Jdi Tam, Nevim Kam, Prines To, Nevim Co", which is another exercise in stylistic shifts. The track opens with an almost Magma-like rhythmic piano figure and chanting vocals and accelerates gradually to a carnival pitch, before ending with a gentle piano and sax-driven coda. While this
album lacks some of the memorable melodies and strong vocal
approach of its successors, it's generally recommended for
anyone who is punk-tolerant and digs stuff like Samla Mammas
Manna and The Residents. -
Ädåm Holquist [October 2001] |
U
Totem - U Totem (1990)