Review Summary: Like Renée Magritte on a rainy day
Ok, Math Rock.
Think about it honestly; how many times have you flung this label callously from mind to music without actually using your mind in the process? I thought so. Foals, no. Mars Volta, no. Even Battles, no. Experimental maybe, but not Math Rock.
Breadwinner were an exceedingly short-lived Richmond, VA-based group who have been known as ‘the consummate math band’. Now in
this instance, they may have a point. As patronising as this may look, Math Rock is;
‘...a style of avant/noise rock that emerged in the 1990s. It is characterised by complex, atypical rhythmic structures, stop/start dynamics and angular, dissonant riffs.’
Well, I couldn’t think of a better example. Breadwinner’s first and last full album is not revolutionary, nor is it even that fantastic, but it
is out there, and it really is quite fascinating. The opener,
Tourette’s, for example, is a mess. It leaks coherence, the rhythm is just uncomfortable, and its broken wailing (and seemingly broken hi-hat that won’t fucking close) all come together to just fall apart again. However, its time signature shifts are enough to keep the listener interested. The album’s secret weapon is its ability to find diamonds in about a million acres of rough and make something out of nothing. For instance,
Tourette’s utilises the quite unusual sound of plucking bass guitar harmonics, while
Prescott (Homecut) tears through numerous chugging and string-scratching techniques to effect improvisation of sorts. Pen Rollings (Also of Ladyfinger) and Robert Donne (Also of post-rockers Labradford) zig-zag their guitar and bass respectively across the record with ferociously distorted guile and spectacular precision but, as with true Math Rock, the drummer runs the show. From beginning to end, Chris Farmer is just utterly sublime. His every move dictates how you and his colleagues react; every spastic, frantic assault on his kit taking the album to new depths. Immediate album centrepiece and masterpiece
Ditch showcases the kind of skill only Damon Che and John Stanier possess for rapid stop-starts and overall fucking madness.
But why, please God tell me why is this album so short? It’s difficult to fully appreciate an album that lacks depth, which means that, quite tragically, the album forces you to admire it from a distance. 20 minutes and 6 seconds of virtuosity is just not enough. Math Rock by definition may change structure and style every 5 seconds, but this doesn’t mean the entire album has to conform to this rule. Songs range from 24 seconds to 3:16, the majority being about a minute and a half to two minutes long. Within these are shifting patterns that almost become tracks within tracks, and within these patterns are serialist shifting mini-patterns, so the whole album rushes by, changing dramatically every half-second. The album is clever, make no mistake, and the album is viciously cutting-edge, but perhaps these two aspects have been inflated to a greater degree than one might’ve hoped. Clever, yes, but too clever. Being too clever does
not mean the same as being pretentious, but it
does mean that the album tries to do far too much in far too little time.
Not all is lost, though (Even though I didn’t ever actually suggest that was), as there is a man called Steve Albini (Yes indeedy) who couldn’t have produced an album of this genre any better if he tried. It is just perfect. The compression on the drums makes for a punchy, range-filling dynamic, this being countered by the twanging basslines and the scrunched, snarling guitar riffs, all in all creating a full, rich (if somewhat atonal) sound throughout the album; the heavy gating also leading to the stop-stars
actually being proper stop-starts, no echo, no reverb, just sporadic bursts of silence.
In the case of Breadwinner, Math Rock’s true conventions both glorified and condemned their skill. In hindsight, it was a large step for the genre, but Breadwinner were around for only 2 short years from 1990 to 1992, and this album was released ‘posthumously’. Where would they have gone from here? This question, along with
Burner itself, can be summed up by three words;
“I Don’t Know”
