Rock

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.

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper: After

Sam

Anti-corporeal appeal

Lady Lamb provides an out-of-body experience

There’s a bit of advice going around musicians’ circles lately that runs this way: Be a good person first, act like a professional, and it will be a hell of a lot easier having yourself a bit of a music career. Don’t act like a “rock star.”

Which: Sure.

But then you run across a sentence like this: “No one in the industry cares about how good your music is. They care about how successful you have become on your own.”

That’s a variation of the whole argument that talent is worthless without work ethic, and I generally agree with it, as long as we also all agree that hard work will only take you so far if your voice isn’t quite compelling or your songs are forgettable or, no matter how much technical skill you possess on your instruments, you have bad taste.

Because the opposite of those things is Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s Aly Spaltro, and she didn’t have Rolling Stone exclusively release the stream of her album because she’s a hard worker with a good PR person. Rolling Stone did that because her new album is fucking awesome. Absolutely fucking awesome.

I’m going to spend a bunch of words trying to describe why I think that is, but it’s not really a logical thing, awesomeness. It’s a primal reaction. Sub-cerebral.

And it’s this theme of the mind’s relation to the body, the soul’s relation to the bag of skin that holds it in, that is at the heart of Lady Lamb’s After. Quite literally the “Vena Cava,” which leads the album.

The guitar tone, thanks to her continuing collaboration with producer Nadim Issa, is just as warm as her first proper full-length, Riplely Pine, that’s for sure, grimy and rough without being amateurish. And Spaltro throws back to that record by declaring “there ain’t no aubergine in my blood” when the chorus ramps up into a rock tune, as is her wont.

But “how strange we all are/ Animal hearts/ Pumping animal blood.” Like the way Moby morphed those delta blues tunes into futuristic anthems, so does Spaltrow create the most ancient of contemporary rock pop in “Spat Out Spit,” a piece as aggressive as its title and welcoming as a cradle. The open is table-setting, a scene so mundane that Spaltrow peels an orange in idleness, but the drums are a clacking off-beat, a jazzy hip-hop, and it’s no surprise when the chorus is huge and demanding: “Have I been asleep this whole damn time / Dreaming up a life?”

What’s a dream and what’s real? By the finish, the chorus is cut through with jagged electric guitar and Lady Lamb is completely disembodied. “I left my body in the bed,” she shouts through reverb. But her head, it floated through the ceiling.

This is certainly heady stuff. She can make the mendacity of eggs for breakfast in “Penny Licks” serve as stark setting, pull the listener along with the bounce of Voxtrot or Erin McKeown, then just all of a sudden go for the throat: “We will crane our necks/ We do not wish to make a baby … We were not built to raise this city up … We do not wish to start a family… We were not made to build this city up.”

Reproduction? The future? Who can be bothered? Truly, “you’re only a handsome animal,” Spaltro reminds us in the soaring and, frankly, thrilling “Violent Clementine.” The production here by Issa is inventive and crazy smart. The pairing of their voices is the only non-Spaltro vocal on the album and it is previewed by a pair of dualed instruments. First, we get a tambourine and clawhammer banjo. Second, a digitized and blooping bass and a drum kit. Then all of a sudden they are smashed together and it works way better than it should.

All of which is prelude to a gloriously soaring horn section in the bridge, big and stomping and etching a wide-open expanse.

There is a musical theater effect to most of the 12 songs here, strong narrative threads that only touch on love when it’s part of the story and are absurdist in their unpredictability. The result is to make the tiny grand, to inflate the every day with importance and meaning. Which is all to bring this out-of-body experience full circle.

The body is enough. Stop thinking so much.

Stop for a minute “just to hear the chorus,” Spaltro teases on the truly catchy “Milk Duds,” which has a quick strum and a tambourine and kick drum in lock step to create a four on the floor appropriate for “when you get back to Brooklyn.” This is organic pop as counterpoint to the increasingly digital contemporary fare. The handclaps are icing. It should be on one of those WB shows when everything’s going right.

And “Ten” will be that same scene in nostalgic retrospective a few seasons later, nothing but vocals and the picked electric guitar, Spaltro’s vocals doubled to emphasize the remembered relationships: “My mother, she keeps a journal / Of her childhood memories, as they return.” But that nostalgia is matter-of-fact, cognizant once again of our ephemeral nature.

“There’s a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes,” she sings, lingering over the words, “once our eyes finally close.” And the horns swell up again for a 15-second coda that’s an artful tie-in to the album’s openers.

That it goes on for six minutes, just vocals and guitar, and maintains intensity and interest all that time speaks to the deep well of talent Spaltro draws upon. Her style is her own, she commands attention, and she is playful enough that it never feels like too much work to keep up with her.

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper has already in these two albums with Issa a body of work with so much to dig into and so much to consider. All of that and easy on the ears, too.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez.