jasonfranks

10 SONGS #10 "Aenema" by Tool, AENIMA 1996

Well, there we have it: the last of my ten songs, another demand for the obliteration of Los Angeles.

Where to begin? Tool is one band that I definitely discovered well before they became the juggernaut they are today. Like the boy of the song  "Hooker With a Penis", I go back to their OPIATE EP--although I don't think I picked it up until 1994, once UNDERTOW was out. I picked up UNDERTOW the following year, during my first trip to the United States. 

When AENIMA dropped in 1996 Tool were vaguely popular, but I was already a big fan. My friend Pete picked up the album as soon as it came out and I heard it for the first time in his car on the way to University. It blew my mind. One listen and I knew that Tool were going to be huge.

A concert was announced and the album began its slow burn up to success. Pete and I bought tickets immediately. About 5 months later they were the hottest tickets in town and Tool were huge--they're almost a subculture of their own here in Australia. When casual aquaintences discovered that I had tickets they called me a Tool Slut. But I didn't fucking care.

Tool played the Offshore Festival at Bell's Beach in 1997, which was a week before the main gig. I went to that show, too. Maynard painted himself blue. And yea, verily, THEY WERE LIKE UNTO GODS.

"Aenema" isn't really the title track of the album: take a look, the song title is spelled differently. Funky spelling aside, the album is 'anima' and the song is 'enema'. It's this latter that I'm going to focus on, although the album itself warrants an essay.

"Aenema" is pretty much exactly that: Maynard Keenan venting his frustration at his home. He chants a litany of everything that pisses him off: gangsters, celebrities, religious cults, and junkies-- and he wishes apocalypse upon it:  eteor showers, tidal waves, earthquakes, whatever it takes.   "The only way to fix it is to flush it all away," he sings. "Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay." Maynard's voice is as much an instrument it is about the lyrics: you can prominently hear him rhythmically choking back the bile throughout the song.

Eventually Maynard relents. "Try and read ebtween the lines," he demands, weariness in his voice. "I can't imagine why you wouldn't welcome any change, my friend."

Adam Jones' guitar is sinewy and brutal; his leads slash spasmodically against Justin Chancellor's sinuous bass. Danny Carey's drumming is as thunderous and complex and nuanced--nobody in this band plays like anybody else and their sound is unimistakable, and that is what I like best about them. They're utterly unique, they're visceral and complex and challenging  and obtuse and sensitive. Even when they make a misstep, it's always an interesting one.

-- Tool Slut #666

10 SONGS #9 "Limo Wreck" by Soundgarden, SUPERUNKNOWN,  1994

I really learned to love music during the Grunge era. I mean, I liked music before then, I played trumpet and guitar, but I really hadn't found anything to connect with--80's pop, new wave, and cock rock didn't do it for me, and heavy metal was a world beyond my ken. Grunge music and the 'Alternative Revolution' and Metallica finding such massive mainstream success changed all that. All these amazing, dark, whacked-out sounds were exactly what I wanted and needed after a decade of listening to frivolous rubbbish. It wad the first time contemporary music meant anything to me and I ate it up--the grunge bands, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Pantera, Mark of Cain, Nine Inch Nails--I didn't care where it came from as long as it was good. And there was plenty of it; even now I'm discovering new things from that era or those leading up to it.

The grunge scene is what really opened the gates for alternative music at that time and this list wouldn't be complete without a total grunge song--but which one?

Soungarden was alway smy favourite of the four heavyweights from that scene. I liked the weirdly-tuned guitars, I liked Chris Cornell's bagpipes voice, and I liked the surreal lyrics that he wrote a lot better than the teen angst the others made a staple. But choosing a song was difficult--SUPERUNKNOWN was a huge album for me, but BADMOTORFINGER is close, and DOWN ON THE UPSIDE shows a genuine and unexpected maturity. Hell, I even like LOUDER THAN LOVE, whic sounds distinctly immature in comparison.

I admit it, I almost went with "Outshined", if for no other reason than that earth-shaking chorus riff. One listen and to that and you are through puberty, boy.

But I listened to SUPERUNKNOWN end-to-end a million times over and I know it inside out; it had to be from that album. So I'm going with an outsider; a song that was never a single: "Limo Wreck".

Nihilistic even by Soundgarden's standards, "Limo Wreck" is a song that insists that not only will everything die, it will do so violently. Cornell counts the ways: it will fall, it will wash away, it will be blown to pieces. A downtempo song with droning vocals, the chorus mounts to explains that you will die in a sea of red lights, and that you deserve it, and that nobody will care. "I'm the wreck of you, I'm the death of you all," he sings, claiming responsibility--and then going on to predict a similar fate for himself.

But it's more than just those smacked-out guitars, those howling threats and that implacable drumbeat; the lyrics paint these visions of apocalypse with some very distinct images. It's not entirely clearly what all of them mean, but then I don't think it's supposed to be--prophecies of the end times are usually embellished with hallucinations and opaque symbolism. 

It also feels like this is a song about Los Angeles; with its references to towers and police lights and blinded windows;  its battle for gold and souls. This is the second song in this list of ten that wishes doom on the city of angels, and I may very cap the thing off with a third song that explicitly wishes for the same thing.

"Limo Wreck" is a song I still listen to when it feels like the whole shebang is about to come down around me; which is more and more frequently the further 1994 recedes into the past.

-- JF

10 SONGS #8 "Liar" by Rollins Band, WEIGHT, 1994

I've been on a huge Rollins kick since he was here a few weeks ago. I first 'discovered' Rollins as a teenager when Rollins Band was at its most successful, but I confess that it's only since I've started listening to his stand up/spoken word that I've really started to take him at all seriously. I was too young to appreciate Black Flag or that scene when I was a kid, and I purposefully avoided it for years when those early-mid period punk bands suddenly became critical darlings. I mostly knew Rollins as the arrogant fuck who did a sound bite for Channel Red (which preceded Channel V as Australia's music television channel--our version of MTV having died in the arse long years prior). I knew a few of his songs and I'd seen him in some shitty movies and I used to think that the funny stuff I heard him say was unintentional. Course, I was wrong--it actually took an appearance of Rollins' on a Les Claypool album to make me realize it. Anyway.

"Liar" is Rollins' most successful single from his most successful 'Rollins Band' album. It's the first Rollins song I heard and I figured now would be a good time to reassess it. When I put it on I was immediately surprised.

The songs starts out jazzy, even funky; the Band part of Rollins Band providing subtlety and texture that Henry claims that he himself isn't capable of. When the vocal comes in it's more a monologue than it is a song. Henry calmly explains to us how he manipulates some second party--a lover, an audience, a constituency--into trusting him by saying what people want to hear. The drums pick it up, distorted guitars lead in as Henry bellows the truth: I'M A LIAR. The drums pound, the guitars wind up a slow, brutal, minor-key assault that still somehow retains some of the opening funk. Henry threatens us with annihilation before subsiding back to his monologue, but now there's a nastiness in his tone while he explains what exactly he gets out of the whole thing. "I'll come to you like an affliction, but I'll leave you like an addiction."

After another massive chorus Rollins returns to us, contrite: he sees he was wrong, he's sorry, he's really a nice guy, give him another chance. He pleads for our trust one more time, but the the band betrays him; the more desperate Rollins sounds, the  more brutally the band coils the song until Rollins explodes with malevolent laughter. "Sucker! Sucker! Sucker!" he taunts us, gleeful as a schoolyard bully. "I AM A LIAR, YEAH, I LIKE IT, I FEEL GOOD, YEAH! I LIE!" He ends with a sincere promise that he will keep on lying. The band closes it out with a jazzy lick, a shimmery little flourish on the cymbals.

"Liar" was part of a trifecta of self-loathing alternative radio songs that I guess appealed to my teenaged self. Together with Radiohead's "Creep" and Beck's "Loser", I had every angle of low personal esteem covered, which I think is essential for every growing boy. Out of the three of those song, "Liar" is the one that got the least airtime. Since then Beck has gone from a busker to a savant and Radiohead have gone from maudlin rockers to... well, Radiohead, the visionary geniuses who've tried to disown their first hit, which is still perfectly a serviceable rock song (but I still like the long-faced bastards). Rollins, meanwhile,  has never matched that success again and he's now more successful as a speaker than a musician. But 'Liar' is a much better song than I remember--the truth is that I failed to appreciate it for what it is. All I remembered was that humongous chorus, but it's only the barest part of the song. 'Liar' is really a lot closer to beat poetry than it is to hard rock, and a much smarter and more challenging listen for all that.

NOTES: Rollins ditched his original backing band in the late 1990s, because, says Wikipedia, he decided that they were getting too jazzy and the sound was losing its intensity. He brought Mother Superior, a local LA band, to replace them, and recorded an album or two with them before taking a couple of years' hiatus from recording music. If I'm not mistaken he now has the original Rollins Band backing him again.