Aleks And The Ramps

Aleks And The Ramps
Independent, 2005

Andrew Ramadge is on holidays. This review first appeared in Mess+Noise.

Of the sexiest songs in pop music, few are as dark as The Birthday Party's 'She's Hit'. Built around a funereal bass line and a guitar more splintering hook than sinker, it conjures a film scene that doesn't exist – a couple, fitted in black and fishnet, slow-dancing to the jukebox in some ugly, orange-tiled suburban pub.

It seems trite to reference The Birthday Party nowadays, prominent as they are in the currently fashionable post-punk canon. But few could deny singer Nick Cave's twisted sexuality, for better or worse – from the crudely scratched illustrations of strangled women in the liner notes of Tender Prey to the housewife-melting 'Into My Arms'. The first track from Aleks And The Ramps' self-titled debut, a strange epic titled 'If You Want It Come And Get It', is propelled by the same hip-grinding, gothic funk rhythm as 'She's Hit', but louder and interspersed with... um, a banjo?

Yes, a banjo. And a piano, and a xylophone, and a viola, and some other things I'm not quite sure about at all. It's thoroughly disorientating upon first listen, combining experimentalism, story-telling and snippets of pop melody into an (in?)coherent whole. The lyrics are both sinister and erotic, as Aleks's voice seeps into the jumble: "At first you thought it was a coincidence/ Your bedroom window was in line with the hole in our fence/ And I could tell you were pretending not to know/ That late at night I could see you perform your little show..."

The four-track record captures the same sense of perpetual creation as the band's live show, but proves to be a much darker experience. Final track 'Graveyard Etiquette' is an innocent, off-kilter blend of electronica and folk that collapses on itself half-way through. From the subsequent mess of guitar and percussion blooms an ominous "doo-wop-bah" refrain, like a carnivalesque mushroom cloud. It ends, two minutes later, with an accidentally recorded cough.

Aleks And The Ramps isn't the most polished record of the last year, but it is one of the bravest and — by no coincidence — the most interesting. It's a pity we're only catching up with it now. Aleks, like his exhibitionist female lead, just happened to get lost along the way: "I saw your missing persons photo again/ The thought of you with devil horns made me wish I had a pen..."

The Cramps

Live At Napa State Mental Hospital
Target Video, 1984

It's one of the more unusual gigs captured on film. The singer, Lux Interior, shakes his body and runs up and down the steps at the front of the stage trying to get the crowd to dance. The guitarist, Byron Gregory, sneers at them while chomping on a cigarette and pausing occasionally to blow a cloud of smoke in someone's face. Poison Ivy stands off to the side, looking at the neck of her guitar, her hair puffed up and knees bent, perched on high heels as if she was ready to pounce. The footage is blurry and black and white, taken on an old hand-held camcorder that pans clumsily around the room.

It takes a while for the crowd to warm up. Near the front, at the top of the steps, a shabby man in a suit and tie begins to jog on the spot as if he was exercising. He glances over his shoulder every now and then to see what everyone else is doing. Next to him a young man in a shirt and jeans starts to double over in time to the rockabilly beat, lurching back and forth with growing momentum until he looks as if he's about to hurl his body into the drum kit. Lux drags a guy in a cowboy hat up the stairs, but he scampers back into the crowd as soon as the singer lets go of his hand.

"We're The Cramps and we're from New York City," Lux announces to the recreation room of the Napa State Mental Hospital in California, "and we drove 3000 miles to play for you." A woman somewhere at the back cuts through the cheering. "FUCK YOU!" she screams in a nasal accent. "Somebody told me you people are crazy," Lux continues, "but I'm not so sure about that." The band fire up the next song and Lux, tall and thin and dressed in black, bent over with his greasy dark hair and his deranged wide-eyed smile, pushes his face right up to a young man in a leather jacket and sings: "The way I walk is just the way I walk/ The way I talk is just the way I talk/ The way I smile is just the way I smile/ Touch me baby and I'll go home wild!"

Lux Interior died last week of a heart condition aged 60.

Broken Social Scene

You Forgot It In People
Arts & Crafts, 2002

It's no coincidence that the opening track on Broken Social Scene's second album, You Forgot It In People, sounds like an underwater scene – an instrumental with shimmering chimes, muffled echoes here and there and horns like far-off whale calls. It only lasts for a minute or two before the rock and roll kicks in, but that sense of fluidity never leaves. It is an album obsessed with the flow of liquids, from the barrage of images of mouths and lips and teeth and kissing, to ships sailing off into the horizon, menstrual blood and dick-sucking and finally, the wonderful piece de resistance, the climax of a song near the end of the album called, with such fantastic and brutal brevity, 'Lover's Spit'. "All these people drinking lover's spit/ Swallowing words while giving head," Kevin Drew croons over fuzzy guitar and piano keys, his voice lazy and gorgeous and effortless, seeping out of him like the tides in his lyrics. "He is a very fluid person," said guitarist Andrew Whiteman when I asked about the singer during an interview a few years ago. "As such, he is very fond of fluids – piss, vomit and cum being his favourite three."

Broken Social Scene were involved in two notable shifts this decade. They were first introduced to an audience outside Canada by Pitchfork Media critic Ryan Schreiber, who slogged through "boxes upon boxes" of promo discs looking for the next decent band to write about before stumbling onto their wonderful second album, and, in turn, ensuring that his online magazine would be touted as an influential tastemaker for the next ten years. The band, a collective of Toronto musicians from bands such as Stars, Feist, Apostle Of Hustle, Do Make Say Think and a dozen or so more, also made popular the idea of the indie ensemble – the super-group of musicians from a particular town or city who collaborate as a whole and as individuals, most notably represented since then by Animal Collective from Baltimore. It didn't hurt that Broken Social Scene were amazing on stage, either. When they played in Melbourne to promote their third, self-titled album, the musicians seemed to have more stamina than the audience. The crowd seemed to be enduring it by the end – more than two hours of relentless and pitch-perfect orchestra pop with lyrics about desire and bodily fluids.

Sleater-Kinney

Dig Me Out
Kill Rock Stars, 1997

By the time Sleater-Kinney made their third album, Dig Me Out, singer Corin Tucker had learned to well and truly belt it out, starting off on the title track with a common enough whine and building up to a wail that sounded like a banshee sitting on a sewing pin. She had honed her talents in an earlier band, Heavens To Betsy, a group familiar with songs about sexual abuse and a particular imagination of the female body as, in the words of journalist Johnny Huston, "a battleground to be torn apart by abortion, menstruation and molestation". Later she had taken vocal lessons from a retired opera singer who didn't entirely understand her in return for doing the household chores – taking on shit-kicker jobs in order to better kick the shit out of her audience. Tucker's partner in crime Carrie Brownstein once said to Spin: "I can't relax when our music is playing – I don't know how anyone can." The fact that a band once known for clearing entire rooms of men with their ear-splitting screech can be so loved by someone like myself, who, it should be clear by now, generally fails to relate to female musicians, is one of the more wonderful mysteries of life.

Tucker and Brownstein started playing in Olympia, Washington in the wake of the media circus over "riot-grrl" bands like Bikini Kill in the early nineties and cut one single before deciding, after watching a television show about kangaroos, to travel to Australia. By that point they were, in Tucker's words, "really good friends" (if you catch her drift – they split, romantically, but stayed together, musically, a year or two later) and contacted everyone from Australia who had sent them fan mail in preparation for the trip. One guy, named Ian, put them on to a woman called Lora Macfarlane, who ran a zine with him and played the drums, and who joined the band for their first two albums, Sleater-Kinney and Call The Doctor, before returning to Melbourne and founding her own band, ninetynine. After Macfarlane's departure, Tucker and Brownstein found Janet Weiss, who would become their more permanent third member, and signed to the young indie label Kill Rock Stars. They ditched most, but not all, of the politics for their subsequent record, Dig Me Out, to focus instead on the idea that playing music was worth being alive for: "Take take the noise in my head/ C'mon and turn turn it up/ I wanna turn turn you on!"

Tori Amos

Under The Pink
Atlantic, 1994

My bedroom was at the front of the house, a large brick cottage styled on the homes in California and built with the remnants of an ancient ship for rafters. At night I could hear them arguing through the walls – enormous double-bricked things that stayed cool to the touch no matter how hot the summer was. When the temperature became unbearable I would push my body and my face up against them and suck the cold out of the mortar and the paint. I slept on top of an empty bunk-bed with a dark blue frame that matched the aluminium blinds hanging over the window. There were stars stuck to the roof that glowed in the dark.

After dinner I would climb up into to bed to listen to the radio and read John Marsden's Tomorrow When The War Began. It was the first novel I had ever chosen from the store myself, one of those "young adult" books with a particularly bleak story about a group of young teenagers, led by the narrator Ellie, who go camping and return home to find their families missing and the town invaded by soldiers. Once or twice a night the radio would play 'Cornflake Girl' by Tori Amos, which had been released the same year – a dark pop song with cascading piano and melodramatic lyrics, which, with a strange sort of desire, I would always imagine being sung by the character in the book.

At night, when he was at work, they would continue their arguments punctuated by the slamming of the telephone. When it got too bad I would barricade myself inside the room – back up against the pale wooden chest of draws, trying not to slip on the floorboards, pushing it across the doorway. The door would bang against the chest, again and again, and finally rattle back into place. One night she stopped and then returned with a bucket full of my old toys and smashed them, one by one, against the blocked door as I pushed on the chest from the other side. She stopped and broke down crying. I never listened to the radio again.