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Weird how things happen. In the
midst of a early summertime musical drought, where the airwaves
were thick with the usual snotty aggroraprockbizkitbullshit
that's come to be known as the Alternative Rock Format, I
regressed into old familiarity--digging through treasures
from the past waiting faithfully for me in my storage bins.
Crusty Leaving Trains discs, Pixies that led me to Frank Black
and the Catholics...the list could go on and on, but I wanna
tell you about this band called Self because their new record,
Gizmodgery has affected me the way brand new musical discoveries
always do. The first kiss
from a new girlfriend is the only thing that surpasses the
joy of hearing a band that you love for the first time, or,
hearing something new that you love from a band you've heard
before. The latter is the case with Self.
As I was digging through my storage
in quiet desperation, I came across a promo copy of Self's
Subliminal Plastic Motives, their 1995 release that came to
me by way of Zoo Music, which is a part of the BMG German
Mafia music distribution operation. Zoo has an office in Nashville,
and they must have had their ears on Self, whose base of operations
is not so far away in Murfreesboro, TN. The disc came in late
October of '95, and my booze-addled recollection pulls this
information up only because
I remember having a very brief discussion about Self in an
Italian restaurant somewhere near the Santa Monica Beach with
a guy from Capricorn Records, which is also in Nashville.
We were both much more interested in talking about Junior
Kimbrough, RL Burnside, and the living historical blues exhibit
known as Northern Mississippi than we were about Self. Subliminal
Plastic Motives didn't have anything that grabbed me at the
time, and musically, it didn't stand out from the rest of
the rabble in any way. What I found to be most notable about
Self at the time was the brilliant packaging that they wrapped
around their recordings. I had them figured as a bunch of
art-design majors that also made decent music. For some reason
I confused them with Ben Folds Five, and I still don't know
why. Subliminal Plastic Motives had some nice hooks and plenty
of fancy footwork, but no knockout punches. Into storage it
went.
So here it was, nearly five years
later, and with nothing new to listen to, I gave Subliminal
Plastic Motives another shot. Maybe I hadn't listened closely
enough, I thought, maybe I was too into Northern Mississippi
Blues at the time, maybe pop had no chance with me back then.
So I listened...and I listened again...and back into storage
it went.
A week or so ago I was surfing
the net of looking at new releases and saw that Self was back
with something called Gizmodgery, and decided I would pick
it up...and wow. Supposedly, the whole thing was performed
with toy instruments, yeah, you know, Fisher-Price shit. There
are places on this disc where the toy instrument claim sounds
about as credible as Al Gore's claim to have invented the
world wide web, because it's just too fucking good. There
are a lot of peripheral bleeps, blorps, tinkles,
tweets and Tickle Me Elmo RoboBabble that wallpaper the sonic
backdrops. But how they got those tones from toy bass and
electric guitars...I just don't get it, Bubba. That Matt Mahaffey,
leader of Self, must be some sorta mad scientist. On "iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou",
Mahaffey pulls a guitar solo out in the middle of the song
that's pure Brian May, and imagine what Brian's reaction to
the toy instrument claim might be..."Bloody hell...it took
me years to hand carve and build me own guitars from scratch,
and I picked the strings not with plastic picks, but with
fucking coins I collected from all over Europe to get those
excellent tones, and these stumpjumpers from Tennessee are
able to get those sounds with FUCKING TOYS?!"
Queen, it seems, is one of many
sources of influence that Self draws upon. Besides the occasional
Brian May guitar solo, Freddie Mercury gets a direct reference
in "Trunk Fulla Amps", along with ELO (?!...I haven't had
a single thought about ELO in years...) Glenn Danzig and Lenny
Kravitz. I'm not gonna tell you what happens...that'd be like
burning a nice juicy steak, but I will say this..."Trunk Fulla
Amps" is a damn funny song and a great piece of work. You
can dance to it, too, even if you're an uncoordinated white
guy from Wisconsin, like me. Given the proper exposure, this
could be a MONSTER CLUB HIT, I shit you not. What club fulla
drunken frat guy n' girls isn't gonna looooove singing along
with a chorus like "I've gotta trunk fulla amps, muthafucka..."
over and over and over. C'mon, admit it...you'd love it too,
all you moms and dads in the funky-ass SUV's, stuck in
traffic on the way home from your horribly necessary day jobs...by
god, I see bumper stickers and tee-shirts and ...yeah...America
is crass enough to run with this one. But if I were running
the show, "Trunk Fulla Amps" would be the b-side to the a-side
potential sure-thing hit "Dead Man", a radio-friendly pop
rocker that bounces along merrily with a key-of goofy rhythm
that serves as the perfect Trojan Horse that carries inside
of it the classic glock-in-the-back-pocket line "Behind every
woman there's a good man, trying not to put their head out..."
How's that for a slogan, fellas?
Influences abound on Gizmodgery,
and they all bear mention because the pleasure of eating a
good soup is even more enjoyable if you know what's in it
and you understand how all the ingredients combine to provide
tha flava. Mahaffey loves his record collection...many of
the keyboard compositions bring Greg Hawkes of The Cars to
mind, especially in "Dead Man," and in the subtle twinkles
in "Miracleworker." The vocal harmonies are stunning at times...the
arrangements in "Ordinaire" rival the
great Chris Difford/Glenn Tillbrook harmonies of Squeeze,
but the hooting and howling in the middle make Self much more
fun. Mahaffey does a dead-on Prince falsetto in "Pattycake,"
and "Hi, My Name's Cindy" sounds like a 311 bong hit. How
'bout a Doobie Brothers cover, "Minute By Minute", no less?
I'm man enough now to admit, that song has long been a guilty
pleasure, and I even boarded a school bus with an Italian
girlfriend armed with nothing but a half-pint of Amaretto
in my boot just to go and
see those guys do the Grammy-winner live. Self does an excellent
job, working those little V-Tech toy keys hard to push out
those big Michael McDonald notes.
The person who may or may not
have been the biggest influence on the Gizmodgery project
is Beck, and I say that only because this record is similar
to Odelay in the bands willingness to take chances mixing
rock with funk with the fucking kitchen sink. It's fun to
listen to because there's so much going on. You have to go
back over tracks to double check to make sure you've heard
it all. Odelay was like that...it was strange and beautiful
and a great party record. As some of you may remember, "Odelay"
ruled the summer of 1995...and a few months later, Self released
Subliminal Plastic Motives, and it makes me wonder...was it
a good thing that Self waited until now to do Gizmodgery?
Would they have caught and rode the Beck-wave to mega-popularity
back then, or would they have been accused of being cheap
imitators? I don't know. What I do know is that Beck hasn't
done a record as good as Odelay since, and if Gizmodgery was
a Beck record, the music press would be lining up
to shake his clammy hand in a hail of headlines that would
read "Beck's Triumphant Return To Form", or "Beck Wakes Up"
or "Gee, Beck Really Is A Musical Genius".
Give Self a chance, ladies and
gentlemen. You go on down to the Wal-Mart there, and...wait,
they won't sell this thing, it has the word muthafucka in
it, like, two-hundred times...just find a copy somehow, ok?
Play it over and over and until the melodies become a part
of who you are and whistle those melodies happily down the
corridors of cubicles at your miserable day job, and all of
your co-workers that aren't in a coma will poke their pointy
little noggins out of their cubes and wonder aloud, "What
the fuck are you so happy about?" And you can reply with a
genuine smile, "The Joy of Self, silly."
-J Noise
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Self