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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Hockey Night: Style Raiders
Wednesday 09 October @ 11:12:08 |
 by P.J. Morel
“Breakout!” says the graphic peeking out from below the lip of the jewel case: that curvaceous hot pink logo, which once graced the squat profile of Atari game cartridges, is now part of the bombastic cover art for the new Hockey Night CD, Rad Zapping. “Breakout” is clearly a stylistic point-of-reference for the album, which is full of squiggly video game noises and catchy lo-fi synth hooks. But “Breakout!” is also a unifying theme for an otherwise diverse and sprawling musical project. Paul Sprangers, mastermind of Hockey Night, explains: “The album is kind of a musical outline of an idealized future in which youthful creativity and sincerity battles with the oppressive forces of our society. That may sound pretentious, but it’s actually pretty simple. The art and music as a whole are supposed to be kind of like a big animated lightning bolt that shatters this big, ugly, boring mirror that keeps showing people the same thing about themselves and their potential.”
Don’t worry—it doesn’t sound nearly as academic as all that. Pieced together with a group of longtime musical accomplices, Zapping has a loose and spontaneous feel. Sprangers is to Hockey Night what Tom Sholz was to ’70s hard rock mammoth Boston: He’s the brains behind the operation, principal musician, song writer, and even financier. The album grew up around his vision for it.
The Boston reference is less whimsical than you might think (although whimsy is hardly out of place when discussing Rad Zapping). Zapping shares with Boston a keen sense of style-as-concept, with the cover art and musical production converging to produce a unified and self-assured sense of musical cool. And both bands, of course, have rather oddly unassuming names.
It turns out that was part of the plan. “When you thingkof the name, no specific genre of music came to mind,” he explains. “It could be anything. When you hear the band name ‘Hockey Night,’ a lot of people think its like hard core or death metal or emo.”
Death metal it clearly isn’t, but Rad Zapping does take on emo guitars and hip-hop beats, glassy new wave vocals and naive Fisher-Price samples. Produced with musical man-about-town Jeremy Ylvisaker (himself a veteran of bands as stylistically divergent as Detroit and Fog), the album definitely trades in eclecticism. Opening with just a single unadorned synth loop, the album changes gears completely after a minute as screaming voices and stereo metal guitars invade the track. (Alex Achen and Pat Stary, friends of Sprangers from Red Wing, bring the noise with their bomabastic drumming and guitar playing.)
That bit of mayhem in turn gives way to the album’s first melodic track, “Battlestar Scholastica.” It articulates the Rad Zapping theme, the creativity that comes out of being a kid, before creativity has ossified. Zapping is all about the kind of trouble you got into when you were home sick from school with nothing to do. “When they got the fever, then everybody’s free / And I kinda like it. Someday we oughta do that.”
Fittingly, many of these songs were the result of an unusual songwriting process. Says Sprangers: “The Cloud Castle song, like most of the songs, was inspired by the song name. I’d pick a song name, and I’d wonder what that song would be. Like ‘Cloud Castle’—what would that song sound like? I found a book named that, and we tried to write the song based on the name. We found a sample we liked by going through music, and we used it and then added guitar to that and then singing, layer by layer.“
At least one critic has leveled the charge that Rad Zapping is incoherent, a mishmash of preexisting styles and genres. Sprangers says that such a criticism misses the point. “It frustrates me, ’cause it means he’s taken the thing at a very superficial level. It’s an easy album to dismiss as ‘genre hopping.’ I guess I see a lot of threads that keep it all together. I think the art especially is important.” The downright baroque collage of kiddy kulture that comprises the cover art is an integral part of the musical experience here—in fact, it inspired the album. “A few years ago I did a collage like that one, and it gave me an idea for doing an album.”
I really get a kick out of Rad Zapping, but I can see why some critics harp on its credibility. It is a sort of concept album, and like all concept albums it forces you to take sides: either you accept the underlying concept as a vehicle for creating some awfully clever tunes, or you see the whole project as sprawling and pretentious. In this case, things are just too squirrelly to be pretentious. Sprangers is trying things on for size, looking for new ways to have fun. It’s an ethos that indie rock, hell-bent on being trendy and exclusive, ought to embrace. For his part, Sprangers sees Rad Zapping as an outpost on the way to something even bigger. “I know there’s something that I want to hear, but it hasn’t been made. I guess the last album is trying to do what I want to do, but it isn’t there yet.”
Hockey Night plays Sat., Oct. 12, at Betsy’s Back Porch with Grickle Grass and The Traces (7 p.m. $5/door. All-ages. 5447 Nicollet Ave., Mpls. 612-827-8283.); and Tues., Oct. 15, at the 400 Bar (8 p.m. 21+. 400 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-332-2903.)
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