About Me
Debut review, Dann Chinn, Misfit City UK (11.01.2001)There's more obvious art-rock concerns coming up here, although at a first look it might seems as if we were trying to bring you coverage of the latest wave of nursery-rhyme albums (the questions mount... Jonathan Richman? Pram going the whole toy-instrument hog? Brian Cant finally realising his destiny and joining Mogwai? No...). Not quite.GRIZZLYBEARUNDERWEAR "Grizzlybearunderwear" Noiseworks Records/Heliodor Recordings NW220 / HELIODOR 004 2000(CD-only album)'If Grizzlybearunderwear’s terrible name gets you thinking of a manic, yodelling Primus spinoff with wacky shorts and tricky pronk fingers, then your reaction needs a rethink. And if this really is the "apocalyptic pop music" they claim it to be, then that term needs a rethink too. No sheets of fire, torn T- shirts, glamorous wailing, and fucking in the streets while rolling in the torn shreds of the Situationist manifesto - life as we know it will end in radioactive studio silt and aching bones. And if this is pop music, then the future apocalypse won't be dancing adverse-chorus-verse (or even verse-chorus-explosion, verse-weird bit-recap) but toil, twisted smiles, and arms flailed grimly at faraway silhouettes atop burnt-off hills. This is cause for cheerfulness if you're of a certain cast of mind. A lover of Breughel's cheery sitcoms, for example, or someone who watches "The Seventh Seal" for light entertainment.Or if you were seduced by 4AD's stable of future-mediaeval visionaries. Soused in reverb and electronic gumbo but still somehow touching on something stirringly ancient... even if they'd also injected bastardised hip-hop into the mixture. Back then, Leipzig-based Grizzlybearunderwear (led by the enigmatic KGSi) would've fitted in perfectly with that crowd. These days, with post-rockers rooting back into that world of blurs, dirt, noise and strangely captivating obscurities, they've got a chance to make a whole new set of friends.So. Eleven mostly-instrumental tracks combed in from the band's EPs. Some of this are a little too familiar. "My Esoteric Friends" sounds like Dif Juz deciding whether to dig themselves out of a swamp or wallow sensously in the warm sludge. And if Germany had hosted a Cocteau Twins concert in a swamp, "Again, Dangerous Visions" sounds like the likely outcome; romantic, rusted post-punk bass, fussing drum machine and guest singer Hirshie's lightly sonorous, warning tones, close to the chin-down, guarded alto Liz Fraser used in more plaintive Cocteaus songs. But the way the phased guitar yields to freeform space whispers and an unhitched scramble of psychedelic organ points the way towards this band's wilder, woolier intentions."Grizzlybearunderwear" isn't short of interesting meetings of instruments and noise as KGSi and co. delve deeper into post-punk art music. "Physalia" takes a rocky journey from distant cave-drums and tremolo guitars to exhausted sludge-metal riffs and queasy, fingers-at-the-brink harmonium chording. The two-minute "Spacer" tumbles out of gothic guts like a lost sound cue from "The Navigator": dragging, muddy toil rhythms and a lamenting guitar flapping overhead like a ragged banner. A suffocating sky-duvet of wah-noise covers "She Drove To The Sea", which comes across like amore despondent Delicate AWOL: chain-clanking Slint guitars and Bardo Pond moodies, with eardrum-tinnitus grumble over the top. "Ushuaia" strips the detail further back only to add even more noise guitars, suffocatingly entwined with gushing tidal waters, surging relentlessly over the top with a hammering beauty. The gothic bells and sombre Rothko bass clanging of "Parthian Shot" - clunking bravely in subterranean echo - mask a swirl of voice being squeezed out of existence in a tempest of rushing noise.But broader thinking is revealed on "Snapdragon (Eniwetok Remix)" which filters in dance music. A squelching bass pulse and a rapidly fluttering trance-techno riff hang over the comforting sounds of a shopping mall, parents and children swarming distractedly through the aisles, as if to set us up for a braver, happier new world. But an abrupt countdown slams the music into driving industrial rock mode, extinguishing the shoppers; and when we next hear voices they're quietly discussing the effects of atomic explosions and the penetrative power of radioactive particles. That all this is being talked about in the matter-of-fact tones of Midwestern news broadcasts, and that the industrial attack is merely grim and tough rather than decisively devastating, reveals a lot. The 4AD bands cowered under the global threat of one overwhelming nuclear apocalypse. The Grizzlies are of a time when the average person's at risk from a smaller hell: one small package of nuclear discontent, stashed in a city bin under greasy McDonalds wrappers and waiting coldly for rush hour. . And "Snapdragon"'s lack of hysteria suggests that they've accepted these everyday atrocities. KGSi's tongue-in-cheek claim to play "electric chair controls" now seems to be an acknowledgement of the casual trappings of horror the world openly contains.Grizzlybearunderwear’s work with dialogue adds to their explorations, although they're rarely explicit. "Patrol These Borders" keeps the time-honoured spangly guitars (embroidered with the hiccupping spatter of treated toms) but blends in along chunk of bitter dialogue from "The Maltese Falcon" - the voices of Bogart and Bacall, strained by disappointment and guilt. The assured, untrustworthy telephoned voice on "Beaver Female Seminary" (providing guidelines to "the True Way" in the tones of a used-car salesman) is flattened by heated, weary steam-press thuds and growling Banshees guitars. "Hell Are Other Real People" (sampling Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man") nods its way along on a scarcely-there-at-all dance thud, while deep, surprisingly vocal guitars hum to each other. Sometimes it's like a more diffuse, messageless take on Godspeed You Black Emperor - all around crickets are warbling, cars draw up stealthily, a campfire burns, and voices mutter to each other; we're somewhere in the American West, and they're talking of stalking and concealment, of victimisation, of the decay of living bodies. The story never clarifies, but the feeling of sinister places and hungry lives poised for flight remains. Beneath their guitars and samples, Grizzlybearunderwear certainly have an ear for the messages in sound and in the emotional underwash of voices. We might wish they had a better ear for band names, but the rest of what they achieve means we ought to forgive them that.
