perfidy

Autumn comes as a real downer to where I live. The rest of New England is blessed with dying leaves in fiery colors, gorgeous sunsets, and crisp weather that promises warm hearths and snacks from Martha Stewart’s wet dreams. Not so for me. Where I live on the coast in Salem, Massachusetts, the weather turns cold and then it rains. The leaves go from green to dead in a matter of days only to get turned into stinking muck by the feet of thousands of mouth-breathing tourists come to town to gawk at “witches.” The grass on the common turns brown and the town hunkers down for another busy Halloween season and a long, cold winter.

Oddly, I like it this way. If I want scenic panoramas and hearthwarmed idylls, I just need to drive an hour north. At home in Salem, the gross weather and the ersatz festival mood suit my listening habits. I tend to key my music to the seasons. Spring is funktime, summer tends to mean power-pop and loud rock, and in the autumn I pull out my downer records—Tom Waits, Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, Neil Young’s heartsick ‘70s work, the Black Heart Procession, and German operas about men and women doomed to horrible fates they cannot escape. It’s not that I court depression. That’s a louche pursuit for tortured teenagers in black eyeliner who carve their initials in painful places. But autumn in New England seems the right time for high weirdness straight out of some fetid basement in Peyton Place.

David Thomas, formerly of high punk priests Pere Ubu and punk prototypes Rocket from the Tombs, has been making music of surpassing high weirdness for thirty years now, and age treats him well. These days he records as David Thomas and Two Pale Boys, the two pale boys in question being Andy Diagram (trumpets & electronics) and Keith Moliné (guitars, violin & electronics). The stripped-down instrumentation that these three not-boys bring to their third release, 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest (in stores October 19), allows Thomas’ chameleonic voice and bizarre lyrics to shine through a bed of heavily processed trumpet and guitar, sometimes softened by the lilting wheeze of Thomas’ melodeon.

The hardest thing about writing about music is avoiding X-meets-X clichés. I could finish this review right now if I just hooked Tom Waits’ “Swordfishtrombones” up to early Nick Cave and ran them both through the horrorshow country of Johnny Dowd’s “Temporary Shelter.” But that depends on your knowing who those people are, and most of you just thought to yourselves, “Johnny Dowd… who the heck…?” Even if that were not the lazy man’s escape, such associations do the album, Mr. Thomas, and his Two Pale Boys a major disservice.

The music on 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest defies fair description, featuring layers of sound, lurching rhythms, and Thomas’ own elliptical lyrics. The opening track, “New Orleans Fuzz,” clumps along heavily under a lurching beat while disconnected impressions float by: “There are monsters in the rain,” “The river’s in the air, there’s nothing else to breathe,” “Live free or die, live free or die.” Even without drums of any kind, the following track, “Numbers Man” manages to swing like a lost Ventures recording, albeit a lost Ventures recording bent on murdering your family. And so the tension builds, until smack in the middle of all the ugliness sits “Brunswick Parking Lot,” one of the most luminously beautiful songs I have heard in a long while. With just his melodeon as accompaniment, Thomas croons (in his own broken way) a long and heartfelt apology to a girl named Deborah. The second half of the album is more atmospheric and leans more heavily on Andy Diagram’s tape loops and trumpet. “Nebraska Alcohol Abuse” barely moves, covering Thomas’ downcast murmur in gentle noises like falling snow, making the subtle groove of “Golden Surf” seem positively energetic by comparison. A few lyrical hints point to some of the songs being linked into a story, but if that is true I have yet to figure out the plot.

By the time the album winds down with the seven-minute long minimalist tour de force “Prepare for the End,” all the building unpleasantness of the previous forty minutes dissolves into a pale sunrise tinged with, if not exactly hope, than at least resignation that things might be okay. David Thomas and Two Pale Boys have created a beautiful album of downcast music that finds solace in desolation and redemption after despair.

Recommended for fans of: Tom Waits, Pere Ubu, Johnny Dowd, Nick Cave, Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, Black Heart Procession, that depressing high-school crap we all loved back in the 80s.

Dave Thomas and Two Pale Boys record for Smog Veil Records.

See them on tour in (fittingly) October:

Thu 10/14/04 San Diego, CA- Casbah
Fri 10/15/04 Los Angeles, CA- Spaceland
Sat 10/16/04 San Francisco, CA- Bottom of the Hill
Mon 10/18/04 Portland, OR- Lola's- Crystal Ballroom
Tue 10/19/04 Seattle, WA- Tractor Tavern
Fri 10/22/04 Minneapolis, MN- 7th Street Entry
Sat 10/23/04 Chicago, IL- Empty Bottle
Sun 10/24/04 Pittsburgh, PA- Brew House: Space 101
Mon 10/25/04 Cleveland, OH- Beachland Ballroom
Wed 10/27/04 Cambridge, MA- Middle East Upstairs (*I am so there*)
Thu 10/28/04 New York, NY- Knitting Factory
Fri 10/29/04 Baltimore, MD- Talking Head
Sat 10/30/04 Chapel Hill, NC- Local 506
Sun 10/31/04 Atlanta, GA- The Earl

Also posted to blogcritics.org.