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coolmarriagerecords · 4 years

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On Chronophage

By Zachary Lipez

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

Chronophage are a band from Texas. They have been around for three years. Chronophage consists of Parker Allen (they/them) guitar and vox, Sarah Beames (she/her) bass and vox, and Cody Phifer (he/him) drums. For the new record, Parker’s brother, Casey Allen (he/him) plays synth. That’s all I know about Chronophage. The internet shows no interviews and, besides punk zines I don’t own (and presumably critics on Terminal-Boredom forums), the music press outside of Austin has ignored them. I first heard about the band from MaximumRnR, which listed their debut, Prolog for Tomorrow, released in December of 2018, as one of the best albums of 2019 (you can do stuff like that when you’re a revered punk zine). Because MRR is famously *cough* averse to cover any band that even flirts with problematicism, I don’t have to worry about my ignorance of Chronophage’s individual members potentially allowing me to big up fascists. Maybe it’ll turn out they’re Maoists (an ideology MRR is less worried about) but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it. Anyway, I had never even heard of Chronophage (a small miracle unto itself considering the underground’s ready access to publicists and music writers- such as myself- who love few things more than being the first to “discover” a band.). But, even while my sense of aural adventure is a bit rusty since the days of having to risk $8.99 on albums based solely on cover art and/or vibes in the air, I just knew Prolog for Tomorrow was going to scratch an itch. Maybe not an immediate itch but, when you keep as many itches on file as I do, you can afford to trust your instincts. Especially when those instincts have already been validated by some punk weirdo in Oakland who’s probably still mad at the Go-Go’s for firing Margot Olavarria fifteen years before they were born. My instincts served me well because that hypothetical punk weirdo was right! (About both things.)

I’m not sure how to describe Chronophage. I’m not a major fan of the comparisons, to Swell Maps or the Messthetics comps, that the punks made. I don’t dislike either point of reference but knowing Chronophage supposedly sounds like both doesn’t affect how I hear the band. Prolog for Tomorrow’s inner sleeve art has “Curse of Chronophage” scrawled, which may be a reference to The Curse of The Mekons. Or maybe not. I’m trying not to project my bullshit on the band. Matter of fact, Chronophage don’t sound anything like the honky-tonkin’-Mekons. Not because Chronophage aren’t honkys tonkin’ but because, historically speaking, American bands aren’t as hung up on sounding American as English bands are. The album art for Prolog is reminiscent of much of the (actually) cut and (actually) pasted Pavementisms of the ‘90s, which in turn was lifted directly from The Fall and all that band’s adherents. Like early Pavement and The Fall, Chronophage are full of hooks, some overt and many buried under transient skronk. But, unlike all the obscurist indie Chronophage shares a typewriter with, the basic template on the album, if there’s one at all, is “folk punk.” I suppose? At least the sense of that genre is present, if dependent on an expansive notion of both “folk” and “punk.” Minus any busking grotesqueries in the “Wagon Wheel” vein, there’s the strum and twang of barely distorted guitars, every string visible in the mind’s eye, maybe in need of tuning or maybe just playing those jazz chords I hear so much about at music critic parties. While only three musicians play on Prolog, horns and keys go in and out of the songs like a C Squat marching band showing up to support the potluck. Adding to the offhand spontaneity of the proceedings, there’s intermittent cowpoke yowlings, some very live sounding drums, and at least one poetry reading. There’s a real anarchist house party vibe but just when it feels like Chronophage are going to lose their train of thought or, worse, ask to borrow the touring band’s kick drum pedal, another fragile and plaintive power pop chorus arrives in time to keep me from retreating to the kitchen to bum beer off strangers.

If we’re going to (re)subscribe to my initial thesis that there are certain sounds made by certain bands that provide a messily alluring alternative to the pat and disingenuous cleanliness of overculture, therefore making a prickly honesty worth striving for (even if that striving lends itself to either self delusion or a romanticizing of failure), then Chronophage are what we’re talking about. Even if on their new album, The Pig Kiss’d (out on November 23), they kind of fuck a significant amount of my thesis over by showing that they do, in fact, know what they’re doing. Whatever. I deserve it. The whole mythology around The Mekons as a band finding dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude was a fib. While not having the chops of The Texas Playboys, and certainly often drunk, The Mekons, by the mid-’80s, were writing and performing songs as subtle and dynamic as any non-boring rock and roll, not to mention post-punk, band could aspire to. Because perfection is so oppressive, its absence will always be its own inherent virtue. But even better than not being able to play your instruments is being able to play them real pretty, but throwing some ugly in anyway. Just to show all the aesthetic bible thumpers that heaven isn’t always the hot shit it purports to be.

The Pig Kiss’d is a sharper, more streamlined, proposition than Chronophages’s first record. The guitars, thankfully still mainly free of any distortion mush, ring out as cohesive riffs. Even while the lite-funk chunka-chunkas still occasionally approximate Desperate Bicycles covering Steely Dan (an under-appreciated subculture band influence… a lot of people don’t know that Big Black’s name was short for “Big Black Cow”), and the snare underpinning gives them a decidedly peace punk punchiness, the riffs now transform into razor-like, no wave leads instead of the decays into noise (or just silence) prevalent on Prolog. While the previous album positioned voices as hesitant souls in conversation, Chronophage’s dual singing is now consistently commanding. Not to say that either Allen or Beames are preoccupied with auditioning for American Idle anytime soon, but they both have cool, heavy-on-personality punk voices, ranging from conversating chill to accusatory growl, which the mix now accentuates. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t miss the feeling of a sinking ship, barely kept afloat by the bodies of oogles under the hull, but I’m also glad for a recording that doesn’t sound like the studio engineer is holding a personal grudge against the drummer. Of course, in no longer sounding a mess, Chronophage runs the risk of just sounding like, you know, a rock band. Of which there are plenty. Luckily this ain’t the case. The desperate, weird energy of Prolog for Tomorrow is still abundant. It’s just put in the service of songcraft more than ADD-infused mood. If there’s a newfound, almost psych, expansiveness in the songwriting, it’s a psych fueled by strychnine over any slouching towards bliss. And when the songwriting contracts, we get instant classics like the album closer, “Name Story,” which could be an undiscovered New Model Army a-side. So much does “Name Story” sound like a lost hit that I had to write the band and ask if it was a cover. (They responded that the aim was to sound like New Order… which is amazing.) Still, by contemporary indie standards, Chronophage sound like countrified First Wave of Black Metal-ers running through the American songbook. By contemporary post-punk standards, which can be applied now that New Order are on the table, Chronophage don’t sound contemporary at all. They sound out of the timeline; Richard Lloyd skipping post-punk entirely to jump headfirst into college rock, making that nerd rock hip, and vice versa. Lightning striking itself. In the face. Repeatedly. And by folk punk standards, if we’re bothering to still apply it, Chronophage continue to sound like the only true freaks in a field of future beer reps.Like I said, I don’t know much about Chronophage. While writing this, I exchanged emails with Parker but, preferring the mystery, I only asked about pronouns and whatnot. Maybe they’re apolitical. Maybe they are Maoists. Maybe they’re neither but still find my chronic naysaying abhorrent and dull. For all I know, they all campaigned hard for Pete Buttigieg and all the proceeds from The Pig Kiss’d are going towards having Chronophage Brand hostile architecture benches placed near the homeless encampments in Austin. Guess we won’t know for sure till the album comes out. But this feels like opposition music, and, more importantly (to me) it feels like music that speaks to a refusal to simply be grateful for the crumbs handed to us. Nit picking, as it were. If not exactly “dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude” then, in the face of endless war and empire and an oligarchal insistence to smile more, Chronophage make a sound that- equal parts sweet fury and sweaty sweetness and spilling over with a feisty, chaotic grace- approaches dignity. If the next few years are great, then great. We can play Chronophage at the cookout we’re all invited to. And if the next four years are instead a happy faced atrocity exhibition, at best a grinding exercise in defending cops, creeps, and landlords for the sole reason of the other side’s cops and creeps and landlords being so much worse? Then Chronophage’s sound will prove to be the kind of correct that’s too sloppy to be smug. Even under austerity, the anarcho-freak punx got bops. So even as COVID, the ice caps, or capital’s poptimist truncheon bear down on us, threatening to tickles our little chins, let us, at least, enjoy this thing.

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

* The cassette version of Th’Pig’Kiss’d Album will be available soon on Cool Marriage. Check this blog for updates.

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