Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Tom Ze - Fabrication Defect (hear “Defect 4: Emerê”)

Tom Ze may take the most circuitous path to “sounds good” of anyone.  To believe that he is too experimental for “the hoi polloi” is to listen too closely to what he’s doing.  When Tom Ze kick-drums with his mouth, scrapes balloons, and otherwise makes merry unusually, it never becomes hard to listen to.  He never hurts an innocent soul, the way The Books might be trying to do when they record child-parent arguments, or repeat a minimal figure until it becomes a substitute silence.  Derek Bailey is a just man, but like Frankenstein’s creature, he provides a rack on which the weak hang their troubles.

To hate Ze, you really have to be a miserable mess of a person.  You have to listen past all the superficial loveliness of the songwriting, the choric harmonies, the arpeggiated guitar figures and rythmic invention, to find bothersome details like Ze’s ubiquitous donkey noises, which are really only out of the ordinary because he is making them with his own mouth - barnyard noises are common enough on mainstream records.  You have to decide consciously to have a problem with Tom Ze.  You have to decide that he looked at you funny, or that when he stopped to tie his shoe, he was actually flipping you off.

OK, so Tom Ze is nonthreatening.  If I seem to be belaboring the point, it’s because one time I tried to ask the disc jockey on a latin music program to play some Ze, and actually he said it was “too experimental”.  This is on WORT in Madison, the station on which I once heard, back-to-back, a man describing how he used to nail himself on stage, and another man shouting “G.G.Allen has DIED!” for about a half hour.  By “nail himself” I mean that the man described combining the two possible meanings of that phrase.  So it would seem that Ze’s reputation travels in advance of his music, wreaking havoc along the way.

Ze actually encourages people to think of him as an odd fellow, with his donkey noises and his microbus-housed instruments.  He often phrases fairly common ideas, such as mildly socialist ideas or feminism, as though they might be inflamatory.  Essentially, he’s a fantastic, fairly normal musician whose craving for attention and eagerness to stop at nothing to get it is the force behind his creative drive.  He’s kind of the negative image of Bjork, who takes the Friday night lights commonly directed towards her as an opportunity to put the football on her head and dribble green jello from her mouth.  What do I know, though - probably in Brasil he is a national hero…

Death Cab for Cutie - Plans

There are two reasons I return to DCFC from time to time - Ben Gibbard’s singing and his songs.  I like that he is not a singer, but comes across well because he stays relaxed, and expresses ideas rather than techniques.  When I sing, if I put that approach in my mind’s ear, I tend to stay happier with myself.  Certainly Gibbard didn’t invent that approach, and I frankly prefer Bill Callahan’s singing on Smog albums from the turn of the century, but I have to admit that Gibbard’s singing is what I think of more often.  I prefer DCFC’s version of “All is Full of Love” to Bjork’s original.

His songs tend to have overwrought lyrics, which I overlook because his choice of subject tends to be oblique.  Residing in pop music, his metaphors typically keep love emotions as the tenor, but the vehicle may be something like a torn up vinyl seat in a restaurant, or a forgotten lock left over from a haircut in happier times. (Maybe I should write those songs before Gibbard does…)  You have to give credit to people who aren’t just churning out typical fare.

The structures of his songs are often decent, too.  In “I Will Follow You into the Dark” above, the main melodic phrase is a whole verse long (edit - actually the verse is two phrases. His melodic structures are still good).  I love that stuff.

This album, though?  Seems to find him singing into pitch-correction software, or maybe he’s just learned to sing.  The songs are also more rote.  I like “IWFYitD” - I like it a lot - and I was hoping to find 11 tracks of that.  The lyrics are probably good, but I don’t know because the production pushes them back in the mix with effects and instrumentation.

Tom Ze - Danc-Eh-Sa

Tom Ze is the greatest.  Why he isn’t a top producer in hip-hop is beyond me.  At a bare minimum, he should be all over a Bjork album, right?