Fluxblog Weekly #147: Maxi Geil, Fight Like Apes, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Bossanova, Marnie Stern
We're now in week two of my month-long look back on mostly forgotten artists from the first decade of this blog's 16 year existence.
February 16th, 2018
My High Hopes And Deep Despair
Maxi Geil & Playcolt “A Message To My Audience”
In the mid-2000s I saw Maxi Geil & Playcolt play several shows to incredibly enthusiastic audiences, one of them a sold out show at the big theater at the Museum of Modern Art. When I think of this today, it’s like having memories from some parallel world – this band barely existed to anyone besides the readers of this site or people in the art world. And while it was kinda cool to have this world class glam band all to myself and a few hundred other people, it’s sad to think about how many people would have loved Maxi Geil and never got to know about it. This is a band that should have had a level of success at least on par with contemporaries like Bloc Party and TV on the Radio, but they never left their art world bubble. I don’t think they ever really wanted to.
Let me backtrack a bit for you, since the odds are good that you’ve never heard of this band. Maxi Geil was the alter ego of Guy Richards Smit, an artist who has worked in a wide variety of media – short films, comics, stand-up comedy, painting, motivational speaking, internet video, and, of course, rock music. The music that would eventually become Maxi Geil’s debut album A Message To My Audience was originally developed for Smit’s short film Nausea 2, a rock opera about porn stars. The songs were about a lot of things – sex, drugs, commerce, ego – but above all other things, they were about the experience of being an artist.
“A Message to My Audience” is a literal title. This is Smit-as-Maxi singing about the gnawing insecurities and raging egomania that drive his creativity, and his fraught relationship with an audience who approval he craves despite his lack of trust in them or their taste. Smit’s wife Rebecca Chamberlain sings a back up part that responds to Maxi’s melodramatic angst on behalf of the audience, heckling him in some moments and supporting him in others. (“Maxi, stay on message!”) The song sounds absolutely huge, as though they’re trying to play a room about twice the size of a stadium. Anything less wouldn’t be true to the scale of this character’s ego or self-loathing.
There’s a line in this song I think about all the time: “I want the world and I want it now / can’t that be arranged for me somehow?” It’s so profoundly arrogant and impatient, but who can’t relate to that sentiment? Never mind working hard and earning things, just give me everything I want right now! I don’t think there’s any creative person who hasn’t experienced this sort of ridiculous exasperation.
All of Maxi Geil & Playcolt’s music is now out of print and unavailable on the major streaming platforms, though you can find many of their songs on Soundcloud.
February 12th, 2018
Christmas Jumpers Lovely Noise
Fight Like Apes “Tie Me Up With Jackets”
Fight Like Apes were a silly and light-hearted band for the most part, but they had a way of sneaking moments of raw emotion into their hyperactive, shouty songs full of references to trash culture. It’s quite a trick, and it works mostly because MayKay Geraghty sang everything with a sort of radical vulnerability whether she was shouting about meatballs or karate or Beverly Hills 90210 or desperately needing to feel loved. I quite like how she uses lines about food and junk and bad smells and weird jokes as a way of grounding big emotions. It kills the idealized romance of it all, and places the feelings in a more down to earth setting – messy rooms, awkward poses, nervous conversation. In “Tie Me Up With Jackets,” she’s circling around a feeling a few times before shouting out the thing that’s really on her mind: “Lovely noise! Lovely noise that makes you love me!” It feels like she’s saying a lot more than she is. You know this is just the tip of the emotional iceberg.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 13th, 2018
Underneath The Autumn Star
A Sunny Day in Glasgow “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons”
By the time A Sunny Day In Glasgow arrived in the mid 2000s, shoegaze had become a nostalgic style tied to a particular time and place. There were still some shoegaze bands around, but they were mostly dismissed as derivative and inessential. A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s Ben Daniels approached the genre from a skewed angle – he embraced the possibilities of digital technology in shaping the sound of live instruments and vocals, and leaned into the nostalgia by making songs sound like vintage mid ’80s to early ’90s college rock played on warped cassettes. The music on their debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal plays on the tension between familiar and alien sounds, and has a collage-like approach to the juxtaposition of timbres and textures. The sound is always shifting, with some elements having a rough physicality, and others feeling more dazed and ethereal. These extremes overlap in the best songs, as in the instrumental refrains of “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons.”
Jack Parsons is one of the more fascinating characters in mid-20th century American history – a pioneering rocket scientist who was also an occultist and adherent of Aleister Crowley’s new religious movement Thelema. His life was, to put it mildly, completely bizarre. “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” imagines trying to have a dull conversation with the man – “no more of this Jack, for God’s sake, you’re not the devil” – and “concentrating on the mundane” as a sort of meditative practice. Or wait, is this more an act of self-nullification? It’s hard to say. I like the ambiguity.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 15th, 2018
Staring Back At Me
Bossanova “Rare Brazil”
“Rare Brazil” is, in my mind, a classic Fluxblog song. It’s the sort of the song I would use an example of what this site champions, particularly in the ’00s. So it comes as something of a surprise to me that I never actually wrote about it on this site, and featured a different Bossanova song here back in 2006. Huh! Well, here it is now, 12 years later. It certainly still sounds fresh.
There’s about a minute’s worth of singing in this song, but it’s really more of an instrumental. It starts out with a simple bass groove, but it gradually builds into this glorious disco track complete with a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar part, a synth solo that sounds like neon, and an absolutely sublime breakdown. This song sounds incredibly romantic to me, like some incredible night in a place so perfect it can’t possibly be real. I can’t say much more about this, really – it’s too abstract, and very much the kind of music that’s spoiled by words.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 15th, 2018
Rearrange Your Mind
I was going to write a new entry about Marnie Stern as part of this month-long retrospective, but upon re-reading some of my old posts about her I realize that I can’t really improve upon what I wrote about her back then. Anything I could say now would just be reiterating the old stuff in a less inspired way. So here’s two old family favorites from Marnie Stern.
Marnie Stern “The Package Is Wrapped”
One of my favorite things about Marnie Stern’s music is that her lyrics very often express this unshakable certainty that we have the power to change our habits, rework our minds, and improve ourselves. It’s not hippy-dippy babble, either. When she sings about rearranging her mind or grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat, it comes from a place of knowing how hard it is to do just that, and the intense focus and discipline required to fundamentally shift one’s way of thinking and living. This subject matter is an inspired and appropriate match for her music, which overflows not only with excitement and energy, but this feeling of anxiety and impatience. That’s part of why her sentiment feels so true — she’s psyching herself up, grappling with neuroses, pushing herself to the limit, and all the while there is this powerful yearning for the end result that comes through in every note. Ultimately, the desire to triumph drowns out every other feeling and thought, and it’s just amazing. I don’t know how anyone could hear this without getting a jolt of adrenaline, or feeling overcome with ambition. (Originally posted 4/28/09)
"Transformer"
For about two hours after the show in Brooklyn, I couldn’t get the main hook from “Transformer” out of my head: “I cannot be all these things to you, it’s true.” The lyric is terrific in print, but as with any good song, the music adds a meaning words alone could never convey. It’s all in the way “iiiiit’s truuue!” extends out slightly, as if climbing a steep incline and dropping like a roller coaster. There is anticipation and thrill, but also this maybe-unintentional nod to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, and having it roll right back down. The thing is, “Transformer” is a song that confronts futility and limitation head-on, and in doing so, sorta games the system, and finds a way toward triumph. In other words, when she sings “it’s true!,” you kinda get the sense that this time, against all odds, Sisyphus wins, and the boulder doesn’t just stay in place at the top of the hill, but instead rolls down the other side and becomes someone else’s problem. (Originally posted 12/1/08)
Buy it from Amazon.
Bonus: Here’s a feature-length interview with Marnie Stern that I did for Pitchfork back in 2008. She’s one of the best interview subjects I’ve ever had in my career.