Olivia Tremor Control – “Memories of Jacqueline 1906″ MP3/download
This has always bugged me: So many bands since the heyday of the Fab Five get compared to The Beatles, yet no one has come close to nailing it. (I’d always thought the same thing about The Beach Boys, then Ganglians came along, and well, they filled the prescription on that one. Bob Dylan stumped folks for awhile but Dire Straits came along George Strait settled things up. So, checkmate on that one, too.)
Electric Light Orchestra? Jeff Lynne sounds like John Lennon, and their are flutters of Liverpuddlian greatness, but nay. XTC? Sorry, never got that. Sean Lennon? Believe it or not, that’s a no. Oasis? NEXT! (Oh, and for the record, the closest approximation from the Beatles era itself was Dave Clark Five. I’ve heard isolated tunes on several comps that also come close.)
Olivia Tremor Control, to these ears, are the only group to break through the impenetrable personality of rock’s greatest band to any degree, and they STILL DON’T COME CLOSE. What’s made them great, however, is they always go ballz-deep on their albums. Their between-song intermissions become as important as the “songs” themselves, the seeming deviations as vital as the instances of guitar-bass-drums-vox. Hearing them — as far as I know there’s only two of them, mind you — out of order is like jumping onto a roller coaster ride 2/3 through its procession or watching the last quarter of a John Hughes film. It just can’t be done; you need the whole thing.
Now that they’ve reissued Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle for those of us that didn’t get a crack at the initial batches, I can rest easy and also remind you that, while Neutral Milk Hotel and the admittedly next-worldly In the Aeroplane Over the Sea reap all the hypelines, Olivia Tremor Control are an absolute treasure just waiting to be discovered by a new generation looking for lost links once they tire of their synths and sequences and want to learn how to make rock ‘n’ roll live, breathe, astound, enthrall and flat-out FUCK again. All of which of course OTC had no trouble doing from the top of Cubist Castle‘s precarious peaks to its hushed, nod-out-and-then-realize-the-record-is-still-playing valleys.
It’s sick that the average dickhole knows The Beta Band and/or Of Montreal and has never heard of Olivia Tremor Control (I can’t, by the way, affirm this is true. I just figure because of High Fidelity and all this would be a given), as Tremor Control revolutionized rock in a few of the ways that were expected of the Beta boys. They psychedelicize their jams so beautifully the process resembles decoration more than instrumentation. Christmas-light rattles and sound swirls are draped atop beds of whimsical riff and simple bass while random, wordless vocalizations make their acquaintance with the composition quickly and abandon the fray even quicker. Don’t even make me get into the singing saws and such; I’ll hurt people.
Like a lot of my favorite epic albums, Dusk starts off with a few cuts that, to me, don’t begin to reveal the often light/fluffy, and sometimes dark/searching, world of Olivia Trev Con. Nothing wrong with “The Opera House,” but considering what to come it’s sort of like “Airbag” in relation to the rest of OK Computer. A build-up, a go-getter that doesn’t quite Get It. It’s OK; it happens. Same with “Frosted Ambassador” and “Jumping Fences,” for that matter. Still good, still not the point.
“Define a Transparent Dream” — ahhhhhh, yes. That high, siren-esque squeal is milk and honey and spirit-lava to my ears, and it hits you out of NOWHERE. Back in the late ’90s the 0nly bands that used synths like that had names like Mobb Deep and fucking, fucking RBX. Not even three minutes long, and yet it’s all right here: What is to come, the dreams you will have, the trumpets that will beckon you on, the starlets that will fill your gaps, etc. … If you can’t hear it, then you probably missed out on bands like The Pretty Things too, and that’s just fuckin’ sad. For you. Oh man, better get on that.
Not sure which track to namedrop next. I linked “Memories of Jacqueline 1906″ above, and that’s as good an introduction as any to what’s on the menu at Dusk at Cubist Castle. This is music that matters. And don’t listen to those live MP3s floating around the blag-ass-phere. Those don’t capture it, not at all. The deep bass grooves, bubblemaker flare-ups, echo caverns, nightmare drones, plone plucks and acoustic swipes have to be heard from speakers to lend the full effect. And when you’re ready to really party, throw the needle down at “Can You Come Down With Us” and join us on Blue Jay Way, where the water is warm and audio opium dreams are the rule, not the exception.
So I didn’t get one of the color-vinyl copies — on orange and sky-blue, respectively — no reason not to extol the virtues of Dusk at Cubist Castle to the sky like the crazy diamond it is. Shine on.
