#whitemarksonawhitewall

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - Linus, White Marks on a White Wall (2010, LINUS!) & Psychobabble (2016, LINUS!)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not-so-recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

The template for rock and roll music is crude and simplistic. Musicians who wish to abide by the genre and still retain a shred of creative integrity are required to make sacrifices. They must offset precision with just enough slop. They must sublimate their truest expression to the conventions of electric guitar chords and riffs. They must cleverly dumb things down. They must revivify the corpse of a retrograde and, for the most part, passe aesthetic with a contemporary feel, making sure not to stray too far from the primitive yawp and drum beat of the ancient past. 

Most importantly, a credible rock outfit must not only internalize the sum of their influences, they must transcend them, just as Ezra Pound threatened to supersede Walt Whitman (but never did). Just as Bob Dylan sprouted from the fertilizer Woody Guthrie threw into the Heartland, and Ray Charles emerged from the seed germinated by Nat King Cole, and the Ramones tore out, Alien-style, from the abdomens of The Beach Boys and The Trashmen. There are plenty of serviceable bands who’ve made attractive rackets while comfortably nestled in the grooves of their forbears (The Red Walls and Natural Child come to mind), but the rock band that can grow, branch out from its myriad influences, will age with dignity, and is less likely to wither because of stagnation or redundancy.

Linus was/is a local Hawai‘i rock band who, like most Hawai‘i rock bands, surrendered dreams of magazine covers, record deals, and stardom for the harder-earned, more secure institutions of professional work and family. In my time on the scene--Honolulu in the early 2000′s--they were much beloved, even over the swampier rock group The Haunted Pines, which had dug itself out of the grave of Kite Festival. Dynamic, tight, tuneful, and equipped with a seemingly endless catalogue of memorable Indie (with a capital “I”) rock songs that were played better, and sounded better, than anything on the radio back then, they humbly and unofficially reigned over less stellar lights--The Persephone Myth, terodactyl, Life in the Iron Lung. The singer could actually sing, and was an even better guitar player. The bassist interacted with his instrument as organically as if it was a third appendage hung from his shoulder, and injected a muscular bounce into each song.

Misguided production marred the band’s first long release on 2005 of The Construction. Unnecessary electronics were overused, especially on singer-songwriter David Neely’s vocals, smothering them, as John Lennon would have put it, in ketchup. (Demos and live recordings of the band around the time, easily available, provide joyously stripped down versions of The Construction’s setlist). Maybe they were overly infatuated with the technology of the recording studio, but The Construction emerged as a stiff, oddly detached aspect of Linus. They weren’t able to successfully bottle the magic of their interplay until 2010′s White Marks on a White Wall.

Key to that magic, and arguably equally important to Neely’s songs and guitar work, is the springy fretwork, busy and miraculous, of Niklaus Daubert, which elevates Linus’s sound from chunky hard rock to groovable dance music in which a Twist, a shimmy, or even a skank wouldn’t be remiss. Though I would have preferred the bass turned up even louder on White Marks on a White Wall, the instrument is recorded effectively--less melodic than percussive, thundering out deep sensations--I hesitate to call them “notes”--between, and in-and-out of, somewhat straightforward drum beats.

White Marks begins with the mellow, melodic guitar riffage at which Neely excels. “Hold On Hold On” is evocative of the of indie-rock sensibility of the latter half of this century’s first decade, and brings to light key aspects of Neely’s songwriting. While Neely crafts indestructible verses and bridges in his songs, he is averse to outright choruses, preferring a carefully placed refrain here and there, often unexpectedly.

The band evokes the urgency of “Reptilia”-era Strokes on “Listen Up!,” featuring some of Neely’s most impassioned vocals of the album. A strangely dismissive 2010 capsule review of White Marks in Honolulu Magazine wrote, “Lead Singer David Neely is still sometimes pitchy, but the band’s best songs--’SoSo’ for example--build hooky guitar riffs to an irresistible crescendo.” As someone who has heard Linus from their early performances, I believe that Neely’s “pitchiness” has always been the point to his singing performances. From “Sad to Say” (one of their early favorites) to “Girlfriend,” Neely has experimented with warping his authoritative baritone toward something like vulnerability. Throwing his voice out of whack for the high notes is another way of singing how he feels.

“Holiday” and “Sasha” are emotive beach rock, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. They are both sad rages against the dying of the light, what one says when a love affair is over and the summer is gone. “I Left Home” has more structure than it needs, the pretensions of Wolf Parade evoked through Eighties pop metal.

True rock bombast, with its winking theatrics, leads into “Hobby Hunter,” though Neely first undercuts the heaviness with an intro ripped straight from Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom,” before a signature Neely riff carries another set of sensitive lyrics. While the slinky interplay between the guitar and Daubert’s bass is the stuff to build a classic in “Honey and Buttercup,” there is something limp in the sentiment, though it is probably the most technically ambitious track on the record. 

It’s a shame that White Marks’s final stop is “Kentucky Woman,” a fake-out that, on paper, evokes Neil Diamond’s pop hit of the same name. In actuality, it is a jumpy but soggy kiss-off tune. It probably works better in live performance. I could imagine the wordless instrumental sections providing that last squirt of gas to a sweaty audience nearly all played out, driving them to spasm the rest of their energy away on the closing song of the night.

Preceding “Kentucky Woman” are two tracks that have become canon in the catalogue of Linus, and would be proud moments on any band’s playlist. First “SoSo,” which means nothing when you put the lyrics together--it is a open-hearted example of rock posturing, a whole bunch of cliches and nonsense strung together in perfect combinations, like in “Be Bop A Lula” or “Twist and Shout.” “You Talk Too Much” is, to lack a better description, simply the essence of Linus’s whole thing (pointed bass line, driving guitar crunch with overhanging jangle, and above all swinging so hard it kills) and the best of Neely’s songwriting: a melody line just outside the range of his voice (consciously so), a carefully constructed build-up with an inevitable, visceral, and almost primitively satisfying release.

By 2016, the band had incorporated fire diverse influences into its evolving expression, some more gracefully than others. On their album Psychobabble, Neely, now occasionally sharing vocal responsibilities with Jun Yoshimura, inhabited his voice with a new confidence, the gruff brown twangs all smoothed over. From the first track, Psychobabble is a minor-key experience, sonically more compelling and more emotionally complex.

The ballad “Nakameguro,” about the dissolution of a relationship at the beginning of a vacation, evokes the helplessness of a traveler trapped with someone for whom they no longer have love. The production is grown-up, the memorable riffs replaced by an adult contemporary arrangement, a muted piano suiting the sentiment of the words.

The guitar is not dead, though, on Psychobabble--it has simply transmogrified. “Waikiki” and “Unbreakable” both leap away from Vampire Weekend’s West African guitar styles, and Neely shows that he can adapt to the trickier timing fluidly. “1991″ is the bittersweet story of every teenager who dreams of filling Madison Square Garden or seeing their name in parentheses under a song title on a 45, but instead finds themselves behind a desk the majority of their days. The song is affecting in both the simplicity of the lyric and the arrangement.

There are some wonderfully minimalist Korg synth sounds on “Shoots” and “Indian Summer,” the latter co-sung by Jun Yoshimura. “Indian Summer” is a departure for the band--the listener is no longer solely directed by Neely’s distinctive voice. The chorus, one of the true choruses on either of these albums, is both cringeworthy and cathartic. “Forever let us be / together you and me” Neely and Yoshimura chant, but with such conviction that you buy into it wholeheartedly. This is not a songwriting strategy that Neely has mapped out. This is instinctual music making, a pre-conscous awareness of how to put the pieces, those inspirational missives that strike from the void, together into resonant expression.

The album concludes with “Red Thread,” a Middle-Eastern vibe married to to beat of Jonathan Richman’s “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar.” Like on White Marks, the last track seems almost an addendum, a detour from where the band had been leading us all along.

Which is, after all, the story of Linus--a constant detour, from the music they were inspired by, from the music they played, from the music they made available to the people who loved them. There is no reason Linus shouldn’t be adored by millions, written about in publications far more prestigious than this blog, spoken about in the same breath as Spoon or the New Pornographers. But they took a left turn into an alley and never arrived at the town square. Despite the universality of their sound, they took active steps to deconstruct formula indie-rock, seemingly always above the genre, or just to the side of it, but never totally sucked into it. I’d like to think they walked the path with their eyes open, making the noise they wanted to make, stopping when they didn’t have anything else to say.