Canon in Miniature #181

Fugazi Margin Walker

1989; Dischord

The second EP in a series always gets the shit end of the stick. Well, not always, but by and large if that first EP is considered a classic then there’s a second EP that’s lurking well in its shadow simply by virtue of being released second. No one cares about Feed Me With Your Kiss when You Made Me Realize is around. Lazy Line Painter Jane is forever kept down by Dog on Wheels. Nervous Breakdown is considered a classic of its sub-genre, Jealous Again is little more than an afterthought. Not to say that in any of these cases the second EP deserves to overtake its predecessor, but it’s a pattern that emerges when you look into these things. So while I’m not shocked that Margin Walker is stuck in the long shadow of Fugazi’s first EP nor am I advocating that it should be the one people remember if they’ve only got room for one Fugazi EP in their hearts, I am quite surprised at just how much better it is than its red-headed stepchild status would suggest. It’s not quite as good as Fugazi or Repeater, and being sandwiched between those two is probably the worst thing that could happen to an EP really, but it’s definitely got as high a batting average as any CD EP of this era, and seeing it get so badly lost in the shuffle is a bit disheartening.

In reality, the biggest crime that Margin Walker commits is not having any one song to rival anything from the troika of “Waiting Room,” “Suggestion” and “Glue Man.” The material here is very good, but none of it is god-level which shouldn’t hurt the EP as much as it seems to, but when you’re essentially forced to compare these 6 songs to the 7 on Fugazi – keeping in mind that I’m all but certain that 90% of the people reading this were introduced to those EPs in the form of 13 Songs – it’s hard to argue that these are better, or even close to the same level. “Margin Walker” and “And the Same” come close, especially the latter with its insistent bass line and huge chorus, but the rest of the EP, while still very good (well except for the just OK “Promises” and yes I know I’m going to hell for holding that opinion but whatever) isn’t operating on near the same level. “Burning Too” (not a sequel to “Burning”) isn’t quite as anthemic as it thinks it is, but it’s still got a chorus that most post-hardcore bands would kill for. “Provisional” seems like a great set of verses in search of a chorus that never quite comes, making the track feel incomplete even as it hits those verse sections out of the park. “Lockdown” is a bit of a dark-horse in the discussion; I’m a big fan of that stuttering guitar pattern and the track’s nervous energy but not without realizing just how little there really is to it in toto. And “Promises”…yeah, I know you all love it but it’s about a minute too long and doesn’t have anywhere near enough interesting bits to justify the tedium. It’s an anticlimactic ending to what was a pretty damned great EP, and probably the one song on the whole of 13 Songs that I have no issues skipping over frequently.

I seem pretty down on this EP, but really I’m not. Like I said, this is a good release that had the bad fortune of being released after one ultimate classic EP and before an album that’s at times just as great. The well that it represents between those two really isn’t all that deep, but it’s a well nonetheless. The sad thing is that really all it would take to make Margin Walker into a minor classic is one absolutely great song, and while it’s got a few really, really good ones they’re all a step or two away from greatness. Maybe it’s just an after effect of its recording circumstances or just that they were saving their best material for Repeater – not as likely but possible – but Margin Walker fumbles ever so slightly, not to the point of it being a detriment to their output but enough that it’s noticeable and difficult to ignore. [8.0]

Canon in Miniature #182

Minor Threat Out of Step

1984; Dischord

Maybe Minor Threat knew that their final EP – well, except for the posthumously released Salad Days but we generally ignore that anyway don’t we? – would wind up as their least well received when they released it. I mean, the album’s presentation is that of the black sheep, the one individual within a group that never quite fits in fully despite bearing many of the same qualities its surroundings; that alone suggests that the band had some inkling that their fan base might not take this slight change in their sound all that well. While I don’t know how it was received at the time what with the whole not being born yet, but its reputation seems to be the most divisive of Minor Threat’s trio of EPs; plenty of people love it, but just as many seem to mourn the band’s turn towards the accessible and the loss of their youthful fury. I tend to fall more into the former camp, but I can see the latter’ point; this sounds a bit more like a Fugazi EP than a Minor Threat one despite the overt hardcore lean. The speeds are slower, the songs are more bass-driven, longer and less indignant. It’s a different look but in my eyes it really suits them, if only because there’s some lip service paid to the fact that the band is maturing.

Minor Threat couldn’t have kept making stuff like their first few releases forever is what I’m saying. Hardcore is a young person’s game, especially in tis most straightforward form, and as bands grow up it only makes sense that they will start to calm down and shed some of their youthful abandon. Out of Step is as good an illustration of this phenomenon as anything I’ve heard, and truth be told the results occasionally fare better than the best stuff on the band’s previous outings. The more heavily melodic bent that the songs take on is a welcome change from the ceaseless bludgeoning of the debut, and the clearer mix makes the band’s strengths as players (and MacKaye’s strength as a lyricist) shine through brighter than they could in the past. These are changes for the better as far I’m concerned even if they’re not exactly the most subtle of changes to the band’s DNA.

The resulting EP still isn’t great, mind you. Sure, the A-side is one of the band’s best stretches of material, and both “Little Friend” and “No Reason” help to bolster the other side’s slight dip in quality, but there’s inconsistency to contend with, one factor that the previous outings had in spades. Occasionally the songs fall flat – I appreciate the idea behind “Cashing In” a lot more than its execution for example, and “Sob Story” is just a non-starter – and MacKaye’s second go at codifying the straight edge lifestyle is just as clumsy as “Straight Edge” was years earlier, but on the whole Out of Step is an album that needed to be made by this band. They needed to demonstrate that they could move beyond their roots and do it fairly well. They needed to make adjustments to their sound to avoid stagnation. The result is an EP that some might find easier to respect than to actually enjoy, but as a symbol of progress it’s difficult to judge it too harshly. [7.1]

Canon in Miniature #183

Breeders Safari

1992; 4AD

The differences between the Breeders’ first two albums were as marked as they could get while still sounding like fundamentally the same band. Pod was a dark-tinged, angular album with more post-punk influence than anything; Last Splash was much less sinister and unsettling, essentially a spiky pop album in slightly more alternative clothing. Both albums are good, almost equally good in my opinion, but they felt far removed from each other that they almost felt like the band’s first and fifth albums with all the transitional work cut out of the continuum. Instead of a slow evolution from dank to bright hitting all stops in between, the band just hopped contentedly from the former to the latter without any fanfare whatsoever. It’s not that that sort of abrupt transition is unheard of, but the brusqueness of it in this case, even with three full years between releases, makes for a fairly disjointed discography on that level.

You’d think that the lone EP they released in the interim would clear up a bit of the transitional stage, but Safari really only doubles down on the differences between those two albums. It’s bookended by simple pop songs with a middle duo that’s more claustrophobic and unsettling than even Pod’s darkest moments, essentially pulling the band’s sound in two directions simultaneously. The juxtaposition of the two sounds works nicely though, with the understated grace of opener “Do You Love Me Now?” acting as a nice counterbalance to the almost Slint-esque dynamics of “Don’t Call Home” and the band’s cover of “So Sad About Us” acts as a nice palate cleanser after the full on rock out of the title track. The duality that exists between the band’s two full lengths isn’t so much explained as it is underlined and highlighted; this was a band in the throes of change that they weren’t quite sure what to do with. The moves towards the more indie-pop sound of Last Splash are confident and well sketched out, but the more Pod-like tracks feel more lived in and comfortable, “Don’t Call Home” especially.

Oddly I’m not bothered by the consrasting tones on display as much as I usually am when this type of two-headed beast pops onto my radar. It definitely helps that the songs themselves are pretty uniformly great, nowhere near as inconsistent as either LP could be and a nice demonstration of why some bands just work better in smaller does. Safari may not provide much in the way of answers as far as what happened between the band’s two albums, but the EP itself unfolds beautifully and might just be the best stretch of four songs that the Deal sisters have been responsible for. Even if it sounds like two different bands mashed together, the over-riding craft obscures the tonal imbalance enough that I can’t fault it too much for lack of unity. [7.7]

Canon in Miniature #184

Butthole Surfers Butthole Surfers

1983; Alternative Tentacles

What I’m about to say here might not make me any new friends, but it needs to be said; in 1983, hardcore punk needed a kick in the ass unlike any other genre. Like its parent genre, stagnation set in quickly and the limitations of a genre whose life’s blood was to have bands play faster than their peers and deliver their lyrics more aggressively were starting to show. For every release where the results were truly inspiring and inspired there were a dozen or more that were just plain boring. The genre needed a band to come along and inject something – anything – into the genre to show that the aesthetic wasn’t simply conducive to a thousand Nervous Breakdown rehashes. The genre needed visionaries who saw its potential. It also needed someone to take the piss out of it, because let’s face it; a lot of the earliest hardcore bands were waaaaay too self-serious. In short, no matter how much people looked down on their first EP at the time of its release, hardcore needed Butthole Surfers’ specific brand of insanity in order to progress.

Yes, I just called an album whose initial missive is a burst of feedback and the most childish parody of The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” before launching into a full on blast of nearly atonal hardcore an engine for progress. I’m referring to an album with a song about shooting the pope in the ass as a necessary step in hardcore’s evolution. I’m considering the album whose best song turns the exclamation ’and I ate some cheese and rice today’ into something of a chorus as a watershed moment in the history of a genre. I’m giving Butthole Surfers’ debut EP all kinds of credit, credit that on first blush it doesn’t seem to necessarily deserve, for doing something that for all I know it never set out to do. For all I know this was little more than an acid-soaked joke on punk rock from the heart of Texas, not an attempt to fuse heavy psychedelia to hardcore in an attempt to inject the genre with some much needed creative energy. The fact that both readings are equally valid and neither reading invalidates the EP on a qualitative level is probably why I find myself liking it so damn much.

See, if this is a joke, the Buttholes taking a shit in the punchbowl and watching the reaction from afar, it’s a worthy one. The joke is taking the tone and fury of a self-serious subgenre and applying it to what amounts to little more than juvenilia, then slapping together songs that sound nothing like each other and presenting it as a cohesive statement. That reading is strongest on Paul Leary’s songs here, the stop-start blast of “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” the saxophone meets Flipper epic “Something” and the gleefully blasphemous “Bar-B-Que Pope,” but Gibby Haynes’ cuts are just as gleefully pointless despite sounding a bit more polished, and the closing Black Flag pisstake “The Revenge of Anus Presley” is the most obvious nod to the fact that this isn’t a release to be taken too seriously. If it’s joke, then it’s genius by accident and all the more compelling for it.

If the intent was more serious though, and given how much the band would push in this direction on their subsequent albums I’m thinking it was (or at least they realized that they stumbled upon something worth continuing with,) the delivery as a joke is key to its success. You can listen to this EP without thinking and get a shitload out of it – cheap laughs, the occasional moment of hilarious guitar molestation – but if you look at it more critically it becomes clear that beneath the piss-take the band knew what they were doing. “Something” is probably the best example of what I’m talking about here; on the surface it sounds like a misshapen beast with little more than a static pulse and some weird sax/guitar duet for a chorus, but over the course of its five minute running time the misshapenness becomes hypnotic, and that chorus winds up sounding truly exciting. Plus Paul Leary – an underrated guitarist in the grand scheme of things by the by – adds in some truly loopy guitar riffs that contrast nicely with the more leaden pulse of the song itself. It’s a truly special song, not quite perfect but slowly develops into the most noteworthy track on the EP, and when its competition is as good as Gibby Haynes’ psych/dark-pop/noise hybrid ”Hey” – the one time that Haynes’ really sounds like he’s found his groove on this EP, sadly, though “Wichita Cathedral” is a nice oddity and “Suicide” might be the best of the album’s straight hardcore tracks – and the masterful opening salvo of “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” that’s not exactly faint praise. [8.3]

Canon in Miniature #185

Moonsorrow Tulimyrsky

2008; Spikefarm

There are two ways to look at Tulimyrsky as an EP. The first is as little more than a vehicle for the half hour title track, which it has to be said is one of the better things I’ve heard from Moonsorrow at this point, that just happens to have a bunch of unrelated bonus material rounding it out to over an hour’s length. The other way is as a full 60+ minute odds and sods collection that just happens to feature a fully developed half hour epic in the midst of reworked demo tracks and extraneous covers. If there’s an issue with that duality it’s that in both cases it probably would have been to the release’s benefit to simply stop at “Tulimyrsky” itself and keep the remaining four songs in reserve for a more dedicated fans only release later down the road. That’s not to say that there isn’t some good to be found within the remaining songs here, just that when you’re sitting on as great, and fully fleshed out, a piece as “Tulimyrsky” it makes sense to not distract from it with a helping of your b-grade material. Of course, given that in my opinion Moonsorrow are one of the better metal bands out there at the moment – I love their particular blend of folk an metal more than most other folk-metal bands that I’ve heard, mostly because they don’t seem to take their sound too seriously – I can’t exactly say that their B-grade material lis necessarily bad, it’s just that running up against “Tulimyrsky” it feels decidedly lesser in both scope and quality.

Maybe it’s just the stigma I attach to the kind of material they chose to fill the release out with that’s causing my trepidation with praising the release as it is now. I mean, plenty of bands have done covers of their influences or reworked their older material once they’d gotten a better handle on their sound, but there’s still an air of ‘not really trying’ that hangs over any release hinged on that kind of material, even when it’s well done. That said, other than their cover of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which finds the ideal middle ground between the original’s straightforward thrash and their particular brand of Viking drinking metal and works to the song’s advantage, the b-list material here isn’t exceptional enough to transcend its inherent b-list classification. The re-worked demo tracks are improved, but they aren’t quite as involved compositionally as the band’s later material and as such feel oddly half-assed despite considerable efforts made to update them. Likewise, the cover of Merciless’ “Back to the North” feels more like the band forcing a round peg into their square hole than doing anything to make the song fit with their sound. It’s not awkward or anything, but it feels a bit off nonetheless.

The real question though is does any of that matter when the meat of the EP is as good as “Tulimyrsky” is? It’s incredibly easy for me to simply pretend that the EP begins and ends with its title track not just because it’s obviously supposed to be its focal point no matter how you feel about the remainder of its contents but because out of the five tracks presented here it’s the only one that feels necessary. It’s a mammoth endeavor, a full half-hour composition, one that actually flows like a half-hour long piece should rather than just cramming different half-songs together in the guise of a suite, that apparently tells a full-fledged story to boot (though my lack of Finnish language skills prevents me from fully appreciating it on this level.) In other words, it’s a true epic in terms of scope and structure even before you get to any dissemination of its quality, and on that front it comes out positively far more than I would have guessed it would. Even though I like what Moonsorrow I’ve heard prior to this they’ve always been a bit much to take all at once as it were, and a thirty minute uninterrupted slice of their particular brand of metal could easily be way too over-the-top to truly enjoy. “Tulimyrsky” may not exactly avoid that kind of excess, it is a half-hour long after all, but it tempers it with a greater degree of subtlety than I’d expected given my previous experiences with the band. It certainly helps that it strings together a series of truly memorable riffs and other passages into a cohesive whole where many bands of this ilk would simply dump as many ideas as possible into the song without caring as to whether those ideas work well together. That’s the thing that turns “Tulimyrsky” from a good piece of music to a borderline great one as far as I’m concerned; there seems to be thought in its construction and I can’t help but appreciate that.

So what interpretation wins out? I can’t overlook the sharp drop in quality that occurs after “Tulimysrsky” but I also can’t look at the tracks thereafter as much more than bonus tracks to round out a release that was seemingly lacking in content. The real meat of the EP is that first half hour, and it’s a glorious half hour that puts all the things I like about Moonsorrow’s vision of metal into sharp focus and never lets them go too far into the lands of self-parody. The rest of the material can’t claim anything close to that, but it’s a moot point to some extent given how much it comes off as an afterthought from the minute you see the tracklist. Even though I can’t ignore it outright I choose to downplay it enough to push this closer to the respectable rating its true meat merits. [6.9]