Heart on a Stick
Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
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Well at First it’s All in Fun (Made Out of Babies, Sin-é, 11/04/06)
posted 01/04/2007
[I have a few abandoned concert write-ups from last year I hope to finish before moving on to 2007. End-of-year lists (both mine, and the finished Bloggregate) should come early next week.]
Sane people bore me.
Their sad songs... what’s that? Someone broke your heart? The somebody you love done love somebody else? Awwwwwwww. Life is so hard. Might as well be crying over parking tickets. Or plaque. I’ll get you a hankie and some floss.
And their angry songs. So much RAWRAWRAWR about... about what, exactly? “The Human Condition?” Riiiight. WOLFWOLFWOLF. Hey, it’s okay to get pissy when yer boss at the Sev’s been riding you a little hard. Life’s not fair. But unless your angry music boils over with artistic excellence – and most of it, believe you me, does not – or implodes around a healthy sense of humor, it amounts to nothing more than passing rage. Count slowly to five and... oh, look, no one listens to nü-metal anymore. See? Works.
Don’t give me angry, give me mad. Give me crazy. Not CRAYZEE with the vowels. Not crazy 4U, or crazy in love, or crazy for trying, crazy for crying. Give me can’t-tell-wrong-from-right bad-touch danger-to-themselves-and-others crazy. Give me the crazy that’s got no choice.
If you’re going to scream, it’d better be because you have to.
*
[photo from http://www.myspace.com/redxmas]
Julie Christmas is crazy.
I haven’t seen the doctor notes. For all I know, from 8 to 6 she’s a personal assistant or an account executive or one of those other things you have to be to just get by. Maybe around the office she’s “Jules,” maybe she’s the girl who’s always got candy on her desk. Maybe there, she’s fooled people into thinking she’s normal.
But the Christmas (Christmas!) that sings for Brooklyn-born heavy-rock quartet Made Out of Babies (myspace)... something is wrong, in there. On the group’s second full-length, Coward, she so capably communicates pain and confusion that – fuck your cathartic headbanging – you’ll be convinced nothing will ever be right with her.
When I tell people about the band (And has there ever been a better band name? It conjures an image of a monster formed from strapped-together infant carcasses... until you realize that we, all of us, are made out of babies.) I usually describe them as Marilyn Manson fronted by Betty Boop. While not accurate, it gets at what makes them work: The music is loud and dark and creepy, the singer’s got a little-girl squeal that should be singing about rainbows and gumdrops. It’s Big Bad and Little Red, and one of them’s winning.
This is supposedly metal, but to me “metal” equals “ridiculous.” For me, metal means hair bands and goofball speed antics. MOoB’s press spew calls the band “a ferocious hybrid of PJ Harvey, Jesus Lizard, Babes in Toyland and Big Black” (Albini produced this record, and it’s a damned sight better than that harp shit he worked on). Was Jesus Lizard metal? Coward’s songs are heavy, but tight and nimble. They are bass driven, guitar-textured. And unlike the crowded tracks on the band’s first CD, the just-ok Trophy – they leave a lot of room to celebrate Christmas.
That’s just a phenomenal vocal performance. In a genre where, if you’re lucky, a singer will both scream and shout, Christmas has a diaphragm. The contrast that draws you in – innocent little girl singsonging fairy rhymes through the dark wood – is just bait. There’s screaming, sure, but words are reworked through womanly wail and crone cackle. Lines are rephrased in a bold, almost jazzy way before – we sing and scream it seems our dreams are spools of string and pigs with wings – everything’s brought back with the tickticktick of insects climbing up your spine.
The consistency is in the conviction. Emotions drip right off the sleeve. Much of the time you’ve no idea what she’s on about, but whatever it is she means it.
Christmas does sing a lot about songs – no words that rhyme, no song tonight – but it never comes from that masturbatory place songwriters have where they’re writing what they know and all they know is songwriting. Songs, in Babies’ work, are the only way out. Something has been doing bad things to this brain, something has beat it up, backed it into a corner. The only way it can escape is to split up into a billion pieces, squirm away in as many directions, sing for help.
This is what makes Made Out of Babies’ music great: It feels necessary. In these supersaturated times, how often can you claim that?
And while you’re listening for clues, something to make you stop wondering if there’s anything you might have done that could have made everything better... Julie Christmas’ voices, all of them, fall like light through fractured shards of colored glass.
*
[photo (from a different performance) from Shinymama’s Flckr]
“Okay, Julie. We’re just going to pretend you’re ready to go.”
Of course I had to see them live. I’d been listening to Coward for a couple months and was well aware that, to some extent, I was buying into a fiction. This woman had to be a somewhat functional member of society, right? How crazy could she really be? I mean, she’s got a fucking myspace page.
So I’m waiting at Sin-é on the last night of CMJ. Everyone else is off seeing that day’s buzz band, Shout Out Out Out Out. I’m waiting for this band to ruin a record I've really come to like.
It’s easy to spoil this stuff: Make it big. Let the exhibition become theater. Bombast does no one any favors. Did anyone ever take Alice Cooper seriously? Really? Was that before or after he did The Muppet Show?
Real insanity demands restraint, and the potential’s there in Christmas’ lyrics to let things get away from her. They work best when they’re either functionally percussive (“in the Big Big city’s Belly the Rats are Big as Reindeer”) or surreal (“all my mistakes sleep on the sun”). Gruesome obsessions only work when they’re not obvious, when they’re observing an internal logic (“drying stains spell things in words,” “oh man you’ve got a fucking nail in your brain, turn it left until the fleas can come out”). Try too hard and you’re that kid drawing body parts on his Trapper Keeper. There’s a song from Christmas’ other band (more on them at the bottom) where she follows “I leave fingerprints outside of your window in the shapes of positive messages” (good) with “I have a present for you, it’s made from pieces of my skin” (bad).
There’s a point in “Proud to Drown” where the bassist is screaming “Redrum! Redrum!” And that’s just fucking stupid. Hey everyone: Guignol is French for “bullshit.”
One of the best moments on Coward, though, comes when you realize “Death in April” – a song that seems to do nothing but describe roadkill (ugh) isn’t really about roadkill at all.
The band has been setting up slowly, quietly. The bleached(?) blonde bassist has tear-away pantlegs; the guitarist has so many tattoos they probably keep him warm. There’s no singer and they’re tired of waiting. So they shrug at her through the PA system and start playing.
*
Julie Christmas is crazy.
She stomps up to the stage through the crowd – there’s no other way, at Sin-é – grabs the microphone and starts screaming. Average build – not stuff-your-face fat or starve-yourself-because-everything-everywhere’s-covered-with-maggots thin. She’s wearing a sleeveless bone-colored minidress. Black-and-white ringed Wicked Witch of the East stockings. She’s pulled some of the same material over her arms. Boots. She has a big red rat’s nest of hair. Sometimes she whips it around to lame effect; most of the time she hides underneath, pulling the microphone in with her.
Stage antics – she falls to the floor, swaying to some imaginary snake charmer; she paws at the stage-side curtains; for some reason she keeps showing tiger claw – are only working because she doesn’t seem to care that we’re watching. But there’s a big, big problem.
We can’t hear her.
The band is loudloudloud, great if you just want to bang your head. But the best part of this band’s sound comes from Christmas’ mouth. I’m here to hang on every last bit of psychobabble and, unless she’s screaming bloody murder, I’m left hanging. For most of the set it looks like she thinks the voices in her head are singing for her, but then – in the only moment she acknowledges the audience – she looks up and squeaks, “It’s so weird. I can’t even hear myself.” She hunches and stomps and gesticulates and turns red and nothing comes out. It’s like she’s in a silent film, or a pantomime.
She asserts herself once, hilariously. Between songs the bassist, Cooper, is thanking folks for coming. He starts cracking a joke about how everyone in the room is really a member of closing act Kayo Dot – and Christmas just starts HOWLING. That’s how Coward’s first song, “Silverback,” begins... and after Cooper finishes laughing at her, he starts howling too.
At the end of the set, Christmas drops the mic and stomps back out through the thin crowd. No one tries to congratulate or otherwise engage her, many people don’t even look at her as she walks by. Because you don’t talk to those types of people. And I wonder if there’s someone with a straightjacket, or a cabinet, at the back of the room, waiting to take her away.
*
Christmas also fronts another band, a side-project with a member of the post-rock band Red Sparowes, called Battle of Mice (myspace). Their first record, A Day of Nights has gotten some acclaim; it came in at #2 on metalmag Decibel’s Top 40 of 2006 (Coward came in at 31; also mentioned were Scott Walker and Mogwai (?!)).
Though it’s grown on me, there’s less of what I’m looking for in BoM. Battle is epic, exterior stuff; Babies scratches at your insides. None of Coward’s tracks reaches the five minute mark; each of Day’s runs longer than that, one going over nine.
*
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (2)
