Enon
High Society
[Touch & Go; 2002]
Rating: 8.8
A rare occurrence in the cutthroat world of the Rock and Roll is
something I'll call the Sideman Bar Mitzvah: a secondary player in a
once-popular band that goes on to success with his own project (after
death, or breakup, or incarceration) which stops the initial cash cow
from lactating. The SBM happens occurs about as often as a triple play--
for every Wilco and New Order, there's like 98 Scottie Pippen bands
like Preston School of Industry or The Kelley Deal 6000. Yeah, my
profession is largely to blame for this phenomenon, as we're always
ready to pounce on an artist's former affiliations. But a lot of the
time, these bands' records are Exhibit A as to just why Mr. or Ms.
Sideperson wasn't the go-to guy/gal back in the good old days.
Hey, what a coincidence! Here we have Enon, the band of
guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist John Schmersal, former second banana
in a little outfit called Brainiac. If you consult your handy
portable hipster encyclopedia, you'll find Brainiac alongside Joy
Division and the Minutemen under the heading of 'taken too soon'--
groups whose career trajectories were cut abruptly short by that
sickle-wielding bastard Death. When Timmy Taylor became an automobile
accident casualty statistic (flying is safer, kids!), Brainiac, sadly,
flatlined along with him, inspiring years of reverent webboard
discussion over what might have been.
Unfortunately, the cultish buzz around Brainiac's short career has
also virtually ensured that any future Schmersal project would have
to operate under the long shadow of his old Dayton purple-hair
spaz-synth-rock days. With preconceptions placing him far behind the
starting line, it would take a pretty good album to force us writers
to delete our pre-Enon Schmersal biographies and stop using lame
'rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Brainiac' intros. Luckily,
High Society is just such an album, perhaps more varied and
consistent than anything the defunct Daytonites ever released.
Of course, I'm not going to swear off references to the B-word yet,
in part because Enon still sound a hell of a lot like Schmersal's
previous employer. Given that Schmersal's epileptic seizure guitar
work was such a huge part of Brainiac's herky-jerky sound, this is no
big surprise, but Enon's also borrowed a great deal of Taylor's vocal
tics and mini-Moog diddles on their work to date. Believo!
took this to an almost uncomfortably eerie level, with Schmersal
appropriating all of Taylor's cast of vocal characters-- castrati
jazz singer, seductive cyborg-Jagger, Prozac-industrial screamer--
for his own performances. Mired in the same gloom-and-doom electronics
of Brainiac's later work and sorely lacking Taylor's considerable
charisma, Believo! only took off when Schmersal tapped into
his own literal and figurative voice on "Conjugate the Verbs" and
"For the Sum of It."
High Society still has the occasional throwback tune, like the
manic hip-swing of "Pleasure and Privilege" and the ominous march
against soda pop "Carbonation," but it largely exhibits Schmersal
taking his first firm steps towards building an independent identity.
The opening double shot makes this abundantly clear, with the
hard-rock crunch of "Old Dominion" sliding his falsetto into an
ominous coda and "Count Sheep" broadcasting his surprisingly delicate
croon. The album represents a musical shift toward electronic-tinged
rock rather than Believo!'s rock-tinged electronic, but
Schmersal throws himself with equal aplomb into the loungy strings
and Pink Floyd sax solo of the title track and the almost-"Jessie's
Girl" radio rock of "Sold!"
While Schmersal is coming out like that creepy Levi's bellybutton
commercial, the real clincher of High Society is Enon's newest
member, former Blonde Redhead chanteuse Toko Yasuda. Providing the
same knockout injection of S-E-X-X that Taylor lent Brainiac, Yasuda
is a Barbie girl in a Macintosh world, warning her robotic paramour
on "Disposable Parts" that she'll "throw you away when the flavor
goes out." Contracting out microphone duties allows Schmersal more
time to rock the vintage keys on "Shoulder" and "In This City,"
creating prime cuts of what the latest memos have told me I should
label 'electroclash.'
If all the genre-name bocce ball leads you to believe that High
Society has got more personalities than Sybil, you'd be right.
But the entire affair is kept cohesive by (cheesy as it sounds) a
rather upbeat mood-- a dance record for the hooded sweatshirt crowd.
It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the
Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.
Rather than lamenting what could've been with Brainiac, High
Society says it's time to throw out that memorial black armband
and Timmy Taylor R.I.P. commemorative plate, 'cause maybe they were
just the warmup act for Enon all along.
-Rob Mitchum, June 10th, 2002