U.S. Maple
Talker
[Drag City]
Rating: 8.5
And then there are those bands which make no sense at all, and in doing so
build their own definition of "making sense." U.S. Maple willfully,
stubbornly makes no sense-- but not in the cleverly obscurist way Pavement
makes no sense, and not in the yammering, screeching, pummeling way the
Boredoms make no sense. Talker, you see, goes to great lengths to
sabotage language, both musical and verbal, and finds novel ways of
failing to get its point across.
Musically, U.S. Maple are the hapless losers in a three-legged race, with
each trying to build momentum by pushing their instruments in different
directions at different times. Guitarists Mark Shippy and Todd Rittmann
play like they're getting their fingers caught in the strings; drummer Pat
Samson plays like his kit keeps falling apart. Verbally, vocalist Al Johnson
bypasses his voice box completely, his lungs and throat emitting an
inscrutable wheeze. Even when you resort to scanning the lyric sheet,
lyrics like, "Your face is a country to camp/ So save your neck for tiger,"
are no more illuminating. And yet the culmination of all these no-sense-making
factors results in an oddly visceral listening experience.
Several images come to mind upon hearing U.S. Maple's fractured,
gremlin-like sound. A final performance at the Rest Home for First-Generation
Rock Stars (a 90-year-old Bob Dylan with throat cancer,
Keith Richards trying to control his shaking, palsied hands long enough to
muster a guitar riff, and Ringo Starr with Alzheimer's, repeatedly
forgetting where the beat goes); Igor and the Hunchback of Notre Dame
forming a band with the Elephant Man; the blues being raped by New York no
wave and giving birth to the Shaggs; the sound of music imploding, turning
itself inside out, being dipped in liquid nitrogen and dropped out of a
five-story window.... Okay, so U.S. Maple is not as revolutionary as that
last remark made it sound, but I seriously doubt you've heard anything
like it before.
Former Swans frontman Michael Gira produced Talker with a more
restrained, skeletal feel than previous U.S. Maple albums, which makes it
even sound even weirder. Before, the squelchy chaos would be piled on with
lunatic glee; here, it's measured out in languorous doses, the empty spaces
seeming to signify some sort of sonic decay eating away at the music. It
may first sound like total trash, but the mere fact that it hangs together
at all-- and the occasional moments where suddenly all the instruments are
playing together in something resembling a melody-- hints at a deeper
intelligence at work. Not too deep, but, y'know, deep enough.
-Nick Mirov