Review Summary: Michigan trio Silence Dogood couch cultural criticism in irreverence and fuzz on their first EP.
Two years ago this July I sold my 1994 Dodge Dakota pickup along with my small cassette collection (Graceland, Nebraska, Astral Weeks, Straight Outta Compton). So when I picked up a copy of Michigan trio Silence Dogood’s new C-10, The Sound of Silence, I was faced with a problem: namely, how to listen to it.
I headed over to the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and grabbed a Walkman and a pair of headphones (still in plastic): $8.50. Unfortunately, the clerk’s resolve in the matter of my spending at least $10 with my Paypal debit card was, if not adamantine, something close to that. I was starting away from the counter when a rack of cassettes caught my eye. Among the tapes were:
. Andy Williams, 16 Most Requested Songs
. Conway Twitty, Crazy in Love
. Conway Twitty, Final Touches
. Madonna, Like a Virgin
. Billy Idol, Vital Idol (three copies)
The cassettes were $.50 each.
I left St. Vincent’s with my Walkman, headphones, Like a Virgin, and Vital Idol (two copies) and walked half a mile to a convenience store. Four AA batteries and a pack of Newport Reds cost $13.80.
I put in the Madonna tape and lit a cigarette. (Anyone remember how great the drumming is on this album, especially from Tony Thompson on “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore”?)
But Vital Idol proved more to my taste—maybe because of the Newports? The eight minute “Shotgun Mix” of “White Wedding” features some of the most captivating arbitrary synth warbles of any mid ‘80s pop remix. And as for the drumming—well, let’s just say that Tony Thompson doesn’t represent the gold standard in gated reverb after all. One cannot help but love the moment, somewhere around the seven minute mark, just before the impassioned cry of “Take me back home, yeah,” when Mr. Idol barks “Dynamite—killer—pick it up!”
When I got to the park I sat down by the lake and replaced one of the copies of Vital Idol with The Sound of Silence. Silence Dogood frontman and principal songwriter Cameron Mahoney seems to have something of a penchant for appropriating titles: see the EP title and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Apocalypse Now” on side two. (NB: “Half-Breed” deserves a fuzz pop update.) Looking at the trio’s Bandcamp page, I discovered later that to promote the EP Mahoney is using an image cropped from Archie Shepp’s Four for Trane. Shepp released the album in 1964, the same year Simon and Garfunkel originally cut the track that lends its name to this EP.
Silence Dogood have managed somehow to distill the essence of the Malkmus/Casablancas slacker sprezzatura ethos into four songs. The first track on side one, “Granola Kids," is the first-person lament of a representative member of a generation with no best minds to be destroyed. Here a surprisingly whistleable melody and droll almost couplets like "What's my Muslim name today? / I invent religious holidays" are couched in an arrangement as noisily relentless as that of the EP version of "The Modern Age." "Misrepresented," the only track here sung by bassist Eli Debelak, is nearly as good, despite the occasional throwaway lyric ("Before everything turned gray"). That bit of silvery noodling at the end, which calls to mind some kind of bizarre hypothetical colliquefaction of "Summer Babe" and "Down By the River," points to a talent capable of transcending, if it wishes, the two and a half minute fuzz burst subgenre.
If, after listening to the first half of the EP, I had any doubts as to the extent Mahoney’s reactionary quotient, I dismissed them after hearing “Roving packs of preteen thugs, / The only ones left besides the bugs / No more novels or string quartets, / But we've still got the Internet” in “Apocalypse Now.” Melodically speaking I found “Apocalypse Now” less compelling than the other songs here—but who, I wonder, hums “Kentucky Cocktail” anyway?
Allow me to draw your attention to something I think other reviewers are likely to miss. The last track on this EP, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” is a genuinely heartbreaking piece of pop music. Here Mahoney deconstructs Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 hit, revealing the shortcomings of the Sexual Revolution with the ballad of a typical college bro’ all but raping an inebriated young woman. To rephrase Burke, the age of chivalry is gone; that of Facebook protestors, economics majors, and masturbators has succeeded.
Listening to this EP has forced the reviewer, for the moment anyway, to reconsider some of his longstanding pop commitments. Par example? Ask him * la High Fidelity to name his favorite pop side, and he responds, “Astral Weeks, first side—no close competitors.” And his favorite single of the 80s? “More Than This,” he sneers. “Better
than anything Roxy did in the 70s.” But why, in our post-Bush, post-racial, post-PC era in which everything is supposed to function, should mysticism, of all things, matter, and at what point does Van's Celtic Twilight dim into something more bathetic than the blackest of metals? Why go “way up in heeeeeeeaven” or head off down “the bright side of the road” beside the Belfast Cowboy or, worse, wax agnostically about how “More than this / there is nothing” with Bryan, King of Fairies?
Star Wars novelizations, Pop Tarts, something about Kosovo: this is the cultural and political inheritance of those of us old enough not to have voted in the last presidential election. Authenticity, that most ubiquitous of existential imperatives, requires us to acknowledge (if not necessarily to affirm) our place as granola kids, even if we're fed up with “just havin' fun” and think there might have been something to, say, the War on Terror after all. So by all means teach your children Latin, take them to see productions of Iolanthe, and vote—if you vote—for the candidate most likely to lower taxes and cut the national debt; but, damn it, think twice before you allow yourself a disparaging smile when you get around to reading the music chapter in The Closing of the American Mind.
