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Clickers played their last show June 13, 2005 at Great Scott in Allston. In many ways it was fitting that they shared the bill with a mixture of established and up and coming luminaries from Boston such as Tristan da Cunha, Paper Thin Stages and Piles. For the past several years there has been a truly dynamic and exciting group of bands playing around the city with Clickers as the center of energy. Sonically, they combine elements of DC post-punk, NYC art rock and the quickly overlooked 1990's Ebullition sound. The musicianship is outstanding, especially the rhythm section. The drums are fast and jerky, particularly on the first track "Proverbs for Paranoids," but the bass holds the beat down just enough for the dual guitars to go off in a blend of picked chord structures, harmonics, chromatics and occasional space rock runs. The vocals are a combination of spoken, screamed and shouted, somewhat akin to early Q and Not U. "Don't laugh at me (but sometimes I feel like a vessel)" is more driving and has the feeling and energy that is present in the majority of my favorite bands. They do not belong lumped into a "screamo" or "emo" or "post-avant-dance-blah", instead the only category that can accurately hold them is "powerful" and "important". The 'break down'-ish part has a great sing along that does what great punk songs should, bring a community of voices together: "you wanna talk, well we can talk about it. / you wanna speak, well we can speak, / yeah we can speak upon it. / but I’m deaf, I’m dumb, I’m blind and all that." The electronic drums work really well to both halve the structure, building symmetry, and reset the tone for when it returns to the song’s beginning. "V.S. the cooling of the universe" is slower than the previous two but with a more expressive vocal track. This song bears the most similarity to the Ebullition bands previously mentioned, specifically Still Life or Amber Inn. The culmination of the Clickers side is "...and put away wet." It is fairly epic for a Clickers song at nearly six and a half minutes, and has a certain quietness that Night Rally shares at moments. Like their split mates, this track is quite layered and textured, often with a single delayed note echoing over noise and chaos, that inevitably returns to a quiet and sweet note pattern played over a sub-bossa nova beat. The lyrics are darkest on the final track: "will the sun fall down on me? will it feel like tragedy? calm? safe? no way." The separation of the guitars toward the song's conclusion is beautiful. They are gone. The last show was special for many people in Boston. Clickers are dead, long live Clickers. Night Rally contribute a triptych to this split, the three parts being "Good Morning, You're Listening to Jazz", "Hey Reeces" and "remember, November, ember" which takes it title from a quote by Umberto Ecco included in their interior artwork. The band's name itself comes from the Elvis Costello song on This Years Model. As mentioned in the interview’s introduction (Jan. 2006), they are a three piece that play like a six piece at minimum. The opening song has a bit of an oddball bounce that is startling at first then hypnotic, very different and satisfying. Bassist Farhad Ebrahimi drops some neat bass chords and runs over the swung guitar line that adds immediately to Night Rally’s textured sound; there is a lot happening in the interaction of the instruments and the voices, but it never gets muddied or unbalanced. That is to say the song does not get lost in the conversation. The smartest line that I have heard in a few years is surprising in its placement, “Footnote--this isn't really me”; that little five second snipped of the great moments of this record. “Hey Reeces” is a bit more of a traditional ‘rocker’ that features a really cool interlude where Devin’s guitar imitates the traditional ringing of the bells. It reminds me of a story about Sonny Rollins, where he was performing one night in NYC the evening before Easter. When the clock struck midnight, in the middle of a solo, he went into a fragment from “Easter Bonnet.” Night Rally’s appropriation is really ‘pomo’, but it is not limited by the didactic dialogue surrounding it. Instead, they use what they can from various art forms to create something that is valid and new, immersed in the past but clearly broken free from it. The Night Rally side really creates a world with its own atmosphere, dialect and conception of aesthetics. They seem most home on a broader canvas, so to speak, as in the final song “remember, November, ember” which is the longest track and the most moody. It builds on themes began in the first two ‘panels’, as the lyrics “Look to the air, look to the poison green air” from “Good Morning...” become “ Problems in the sky, this isn't really me.” It shifts from quietly dark and delayed guitar runs to a more melodic breakdown section that descends into a really dense and atmospheric segment in which piano slowly enters. The last track especially is completely moving, far better than anything Radiohead has done since OK Computer in my humble opinion. I am really looking forward to their full length. Honeypump did a limited run of 500 of these records, and I highly suggest you go over to honeypump.net and get yourself an analogue copy. All the songs and artwork are also available for download at the same site through Creative Commons. For those who do not know, Creative Commons is a non-profit licensing company that allows the distribution of the material while the artist still retains the rights to the work. If you are too broke or too cheap to invest in the 12”, there is absolutely no excuse as to why you can not at least listen to this record, and then go see Night Rally, The Wilderness and the rest of the new Clickers projects live. Reviewed by: Chris Bock |
