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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Self-Evident: Skilled rock for non-prog people
Wednesday 24 September @ 13:00:56 |
 by P.J. Morel
What’s wrong with complex music? Rock snobs roll their eyes with disdain at the mention of any band that happens to dig something other than the usual verse-chorus-verse pop arrangement. “It’s not rock,” they say. “Rock is folk music. It’s not a symphony. These guys should learn to play violins.” Granted, most of the bands they’re rolling their eyes at deserve the treatment. Seventies monsters like ELP and Kansas took orchestral rock to mind-numbing depths, drawing out a handful of guitar riffs into flimsy house-of-cards “masterpieces” that were easily recognized for what they are.
More recently, buy-it-in-bulk jam bands like Dave Mathews have been equally egregious in their use of never-ending “interlude” passages to pad otherwise brief, radio friendly arrangements. If the complaint is that some bands need more editing, not less, then I’m in complete agreement.
On the other hand, I sometimes feel like rock is a bit too smug about its remedial status. Rock fans have turned “progressive” into a dirty word and exile any would-be innovators to the netherworld of dork rock. Bands like the Dismemberment Plan have been out to prove that that’s not fair.
For the past few years there’s been a local band in your midst that’s been doing the same.
Self-Evident is a trio of talented young musicians who obviously take playing very seriously, but know how to make a song stand on it’s own. Lately I’ve found their combination of jazz-quality musicianship and pop song-craft quite inspiring. It’s a hard thing to describe, because I don’t mean to pigeonhole the band: I feel like any introduction that mentions their progressive sensibility is bound to turn a lot of people off. But I hear that sort of complexity in their music, and it’s important to note that I like it because of that complexity, not despite it.
“I guess our angle on the whole thing is, yes we write some complicated stuff, but we write music to write music,” guitarist and singer Conrad Mach says. And it comes out that way. Self-Evident’s most recent album, Angular, out this year on Blue Worm Records, is testimony to that. It has elements of punk, metal, math rock and pop, but it’s distinguished by the cohesiveness of the songs.
You can tell by listening that Self-Evident's oddball blend of styles depends in large part on the personal chemistry of the band for cohesion. Guitarist Mach, bassist Tom Berg and drummer Brian Heitzman have developed their signature style through countless hours of playing together. "Back in ‘97 me and Brian were playing in another project that wasn't really going anywhere," Berg explains.
"We were fresh out of high school, and we were at a point where we were like, 'we should do something more serious.' And that was when we hooked up with Conrad. So I guess it's been going on for six years now. Weird."
As may be expected, the band's tight relationship weighs heavily on the songwriting process, which begins and ends with instrumental interplay. "One of us will write a part and we'll kinda jam something out, work it into a part, and then we'll write a song around that or write that into a song," says Berg. "It's kind of a group effort, more or less."
What I find most impressive about the band is their playing. Like a lot of people, I tend to dismiss musicianship beyond the obvious fact that it takes great musicians to make a great band. And I certainly don’t mean to imply that Mach, for instance, excellent guitarist that he is, plays with drab Joe Satriani precision. But there are parts of Angular that I find very moving just for the quality of the playing, “Solidarity” for example: the song begins with a lurching, sort of ominous riff that has all three members rumbling along. The vocal drifts in high and plaintive, and the song builds as it shifts between melancholy, melodic passages and the gurgling verse riff.
You get the sense, just from the notes, that the song is articulating a feeling quite different to the triumphal notion of “Solidarity” that the lyrics suggest. It’s the sound of someone losing the fight. The song comes to a head when the bass and drums drop out, and Mach’s guitar lets loose with something that sounds like a last gasp, a cry of defeat, before Berg and Heitzman return to carry the song out like a wounded fighter.
I admit, some songs on Angular work better for me than others, but you expect as much when someone is trying to come up with a new formula, not perfect an existing one. And the lyrics, sparse as they are, are sometimes a bit too nondescript, fragments of personal situations that aren't quite unique enough to illicit much sympathy from the listener. But there's a core of real emotion in the music that does that, and some sturdy lyrics would take Self-Evident that much further.
I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel like buzz bands, especially local buzz bands, get attention because they do a well-known style particularly well. None of us can go see the Buzzcocks at the Triple Rock on a Friday night, but hey we can go see the...whoever. That simulacrum earns some bands a big crowd. Self-Evident isn't one of those bands. They're not doing anything terribly hip, stylistically speaking. What they are doing is making compelling, moving music from the notes up, making a conscious effort to avoid convention and speaking with their own voices. If things sometimes get complex, well...who said life was simple?
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