6gig: Mind Over Mind

Sam

Over and above

Never mind the bollocks, here’s 6gig

Start with the band’s name: it should say something about the group, define them without putting them in an unfortunately small box. The Beatles had a great name when they were four mop-topped lads from Liverpool, but was The White Album really recorded by “The Beatles”? Rage Against the Machine? I’ve always thought that name put them in a very tight space, indeed. Could that band ever write a decent ballad and not have it sound silly?

With 6gig, we have a moniker that says precision, calculation, speed, and intelligence and rings with frontman Walt Craven’s self-depreciating story about how he’s a computer geek and just sort of came up with it. (It also gave us an idea in the office: What if you named a band 6gig, then played only six gigs and quit?)

But 6gig’s meaning provides a more-than-apt description for their music: tight, written out to the smallest beep and whir, with quick riffs and rhythms put together in ways that you haven’t heard before, but reserved and humble enough to keep them from sounding like Dream Theater or math rock. Plus, they’re a band whose professionalism in the studio is the stuff of local legend, a band whose first take is often their last.

But what about Craven’s impassioned vocals, alternately sung and screamed? Okay, so computers and melody may not make for a ready free association, but there is a lyrical quality to 6gig’s two syllables, sibilant and guttural, the “x” and “g” working together like light and heavy elements to form a willing compound.

6gig are what a fully realized band looks like. That sounds a bit like a hypothesis, and it fits them — a scientific method for their scientific musical creation. And, finally, the proof is readily available now that you can say the same about their sophomore full-length release, Mind over Mind (how’s that for emphasizing the cerebral?). There’s heart there, too, of course — beating through the layers of steel and cable that have been erected to protect it.

And this aesthetic pervades everything the band does. The packaging for the new album is brilliant, reds and blues mirroring grays and metallics, meshing Craven’s technical (CAD training?) designs with Bob Smyth’s organic forms, the schematics just abstract enough to suggest living organisms. Every lyric is there, and there are notations above and beyond the standard to let the reader (cover band?) know just which verse repeats when, and which codas are extended or reprised. Plus, look at the thank yous: They’re all-encompassing, equally full of family, friends, and industry types who have helped them along the way — but they’re in alphabetical order!

All of this is to say that they couldn’t have done better than Matt Wallace (Faith No More, most famously) as producer, the last cog in any band’s musical machine. He has taken this grand vision of a technical musical masterpiece and crafted it expertly. The opening track, “Space Suit,” more prelude than introduction, is a whir of pneumatic pumps and gadgets, Craven’s voice a distant jumble of barely comprehensible phrases. This is an album, one where nothing is tossed off, and everything is wedded to the purpose. Again, this “Space Suit” theme surprisingly reappears for 14 seconds between tracks six and seven, the CD player counting solemnly down in the negative like a rocket bracing for liftoff.

But what is all this technical wizardry masking? Real passion — as evidenced on the band’s first single and the first song here, “Whose Side Are You On?” Wallace here, as on much of the album, gives Craven personality by keeping his vocals high in the mix, immediate and captivating. The bass line from Weave is dark and methodical. Climbing guitar lines go up and down stairs while multi-tracked background vocals arc in and out of the mix. The anger is palpable: “I heard what you did, it crept under my skin/ The things that you do disgust me.”

It’s a recurring theme, this anger.

Rock and roll (and its increasingly heavier musical children) has always been the uplifter/reflection of disaffected youth, of course, and those that eschew pop eventually come back around to it by embracing that inner societal revulsion that most intelligent music fans can’t help but harbor toward a world where the Backstreet Boys are rich and famous and classical musicians are forced to pay orchestras to perform their compositions.

Want to rebel against your folks/school/government by finding an empathetic voice? Well, why don’t you take Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden, Green Day, or Marilyn Manson for a spin? That usually works pretty good. It’s so loud! So shocking! And just look at them!

Lately, however, bands like Korn and Slipknot have turned this back upon itself, and made the condition of today’s youth their rallying cry and pennant, taking experiences of broken homes and battered mothers and turning them into platinum records. This isn’t just teen angst, this is a reflection of the truly tattered edges of a society that often seems to treat its most valuable resource as disposable income.

Truth be told, however, I’ve never bought the sentiment of these bands for a second. Maybe these emotions were heartfelt once, but the labels so marketed and embraced the ethic that it soon became nothing more than a way to sell records. How many videos do I have to watch where a kid in a soiled T-shirt and a bad haircut watches as his drunken father knocks around his poor, wailing mother? Isn’t that video’s appearance on MTV the height of cynicism?

6gig, however, show here that teen angst can still be done well, while embracing the contemporary tragedies that no other era of rock and roll has ever really imagined. The grunge kids were troubled, sure, and Nevermind and Ten contained brutal images, but it all felt so suburban and narrative, the overall question being asked something along the lines of “Why me?”

With Mind over Mind, however, the question is more like, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“Proud,” for example, asks the question through irony. Both the rocking, singalong cadence and the content of the chorus are jarring.

Thank you/ For lying to my face/ For wasting all my time/ For being drunk again.

Thank you/ For making my mom cry/ For screaming in my face/ For everything you did to us.

I’m so proud of you.

There is a seriousness here borne out by the irony, a resiliency born of distress and adversity overcome. The bridge is a quiet rehearsal of prose poetry over background drums (superb throughout from the late Dave Rankin, though Jason Stewart is now wholly ensconced with the band) and a strummed guitar. The bass entry is cool and melodic, up, up, down, like hopes and dreams.

“Deadbeat” is another ode to “ocean-size letdown,” but personal enough to avoid the cliché. Is it clear that a generation of fathers have abandoned their duty like never before? Yes, by now, quite. But what makes this ring true are the “after-shave smells,” “a telephone call,” “no more baked-bean fat,” “laying out on the grass.”

“Can you bear the thought of losing the love of your family?” 6gig are clearly incredulous that some people all too easily can.

But there’s that resiliency again, undeniable. “Start Again” makes it clear that “I thought about giving in,” but “you cannot make my mind up . . . I’ll start again.” Ending with a blinding guitar solo from Steve Marquis (a rare spot of individual-instrument emphasis), the departure from 6gig’s signature guitar sound of a low chunk tied with a screaming, high punctuation is a notice that the band isn’t afraid to surprise you.

They are, in the end, “Free,” and “I’ll never go back again/ And it’s the only way that I wanna be.” Along with the chorus to “Words,” which might be the best Craven has ever sounded on record, this is a statement that should not be regarded lightly. 6gig know exactly what they want to do, how to do it, and their vision has been realized.

Hook up, plug in, and take notice.

Ray LaMontagne: Till The Sun Turns Black

Sam

Fade to Black

All roads lead back to Ray LaMontagne

Ray LaMontagne is a pretty funny guy. But it’s a subtle humor. Take the 2003 show at the Center for Cultural Exchange (may it RIP), where he gave the crowd a big explanation about how he was working on a tune for Sesame Street.

Would we like to hear it? God, yes, the 75 people in attendance implored. Already he could do virtually no wrong. So, he started to play, reading the lyrics from a legal pad next to him.

“I hate,” he sang, “my fucking job.”

If we were eating out of his hand after a song or two, at this point we probably would have donated to his kids’ college fund.

Which is what LaMontagne’s well on his way to making an afterthought as he releases his second RCA album, following sales of 300,000 copies of his Trouble and more than two straight years of touring the world. Nose to the grindstone, he’s thousands of miles from his wife and family as he tries to make his nut.

If only, after hearing Till the Sun Turns Black, it didn’t seem so much like he hated his fucking job.

A brilliant and moving disc, this new album is charged with a pathos that can’t be an act. LaMontagne is an old soul ill-fit for our modern world, just a few years removed from living off the grid, when the demands of touring forced his family to move closer to society and things like cable television. Planes, security, Guster’s hippy fans, Japanese society—these are the things that leave LaMontagne wondering: “Will I always feel this way / So empty and so estranged?”

That’s the chorus from “Empty,” the album’s second track and a wonderfully shuffling sad cowboy tune (and the only previously released track, having shown up on last year’s Live From Bonnaroo EP). A cello and violin open (there are strings on most every song here, thanks to the production of LaMontagne’s right-hand man, Ethan Johns), then come in a perfectly paired rhythm section of brushed drums and walking stand-up bass. The lyrics are the kind of writing that has made LaMontagne a star, paired with his delivery, an aching exhalation like he’s ripping his chest open in front of you. It feels like gospel, and I don’t mean the musical genre: “I looked my demons in the eyes, said do your best, destroy me / I’ve been to hell and back so many times I must admit you kind of bore me / There’s a lot of ways to kill a man / There’s a lot of ways to die … There’s a lot of things I don’t understand / Why so many people lie.”

Is he a folk-slinging Cobain? Destined to only get more depressed and disappointed by the prospect of getting everything he every wanted?

With LaMontagne, it’s a lot simpler than the pressures of oncoming fame. Rather, I think he’s just homesick, writing songs on the road that come from emotions that would exist even if every flight was first class and every security check came with a red carpet.

The album’s single, “Three More Days,” couldn’t be simpler. The only real rocker here, it’s a Motown send-up, late-career Ray Charles (his namesake), full of big horns putting LaMontagne forward as bandleader and Southern rock guitar that should remind you of last album’s “How Come.”

And the sentiment is just as simple. “Three more days, girl you know I’ll be comin’ home to you darlin,’” LaMontagne emotes at his most impassioned. He’s contrite – “I know it’s wrong to be so far from home” – but he’s practical: “I just gotta get this good job done / So I can bring it on home to you.”

Elsewhere, things are not so cut and dry. The production, Johns playing many of the instruments, often seems unnecessary, like the music that intrudes into movies, telling you how you’re supposed to feel when it ought to be obvious. “Can I Stay,” with a bit of demo-like hiss, is heartbreaking on its own, LaMontange imploring, “Can I stay here with you till the morning / There’s nothing I’d like more than to wake up on your floor.” But his naked emotion is dressed up in descending string progressions.

Similarly, the ukelele (or some other odd-sounding deviation on a guitar) in “Gone Away From Me” makes what could be a distinctive rhythm sound exactly like Hans Zimmer’s instrumental theme to True Romance (full disclosure: My wife called that).

It’s hard not to wonder whether Johns hasn’t become more LaMontagne band member than producer, in a way forsaking the producer’s role of making hard decisions about when too much is just too much. Ray’s a charismatic guy. He wouldn’t be the first to try to make him happy.

Can that be done? You wouldn’t know it from LaMontagne’s first two albums. And though I’m not here to say it’s his job to blow sunshine up your ass, it’s hard not to feel like this album is, yes, blacker than the first. Trouble’s “Hannah,” “Jolene,” and “Shelter” somehow had a hope that’s largely missing here. The title track alone, where LaMontagne picks apart our social structure and finds even the wise man’s lot ultimately hopeless, should be enough to get you reaching for the whiskey.

Still, there is the album’s finisher, “Within You,” that acts as an uplifting coda in the way that “Her Majesty” rejects the irony and bombast of Abbey Road. Built on a gentle strum, with a tambourine for rhythm, LaMontange meditates on a single couplet for about five minutes. “War is not the answer,” he breathes, his vocals as high as Iron & Wine, “The answer is within you.”

Is this politics, or is this a simple acknowledgement that sometimes you just have to take life as it comes? Well, as Wilco sang, when “it’s a war on war / You’re gonna lose.” And I think LaMontagne would agree that “you have to learn how to die.”