And then there are those bands which make no sense at all, and in doing so build their own definition of "making sense." U.S. Maple willfully, stubbornly makes no sense-- but not in the cleverly obscurist way Pavement makes no sense, and not in the yammering, screeching, pummeling way the Boredoms make no sense. Talker, you see, goes to great lengths to sabotage language, both musical and verbal, and finds novel ways of failing to get its point across.
Musically, U.S. Maple are the hapless losers in a three-legged race, with each trying to build momentum by pushing their instruments in different directions at different times. Guitarists Mark Shippy and Todd Rittmann play like they're getting their fingers caught in the strings; drummer Pat Samson plays like his kit keeps falling apart. Verbally, vocalist Al Johnson bypasses his voice box completely, his lungs and throat emitting an inscrutable wheeze. Even when you resort to scanning the lyric sheet, lyrics like, "Your face is a country to camp/ So save your neck for tiger," are no more illuminating. And yet the culmination of all these no-sense-making factors results in an oddly visceral listening experience.
Several images come to mind upon hearing U.S. Maple's fractured, gremlin-like sound. A final performance at the Rest Home for First-Generation Rock Stars (a 90-year-old Bob Dylan with throat cancer, Keith Richards trying to control his shaking, palsied hands long enough to muster a guitar riff, and Ringo Starr with Alzheimer's, repeatedly forgetting where the beat goes); Igor and the Hunchback of Notre Dame forming a band with the Elephant Man; the blues being raped by New York no wave and giving birth to the Shaggs; the sound of music imploding, turning itself inside out, being dipped in liquid nitrogen and dropped out of a five-story window.... Okay, so U.S. Maple is not as revolutionary as that last remark made it sound, but I seriously doubt you've heard anything like it before.
Former Swans frontman Michael Gira produced Talker with a more restrained, skeletal feel than previous U.S. Maple albums, which makes it even sound even weirder. Before, the squelchy chaos would be piled on with lunatic glee; here, it's measured out in languorous doses, the empty spaces seeming to signify some sort of sonic decay eating away at the music. It may first sound like total trash, but the mere fact that it hangs together at all-- and the occasional moments where suddenly all the instruments are playing together in something resembling a melody-- hints at a deeper intelligence at work. Not too deep, but, y'know, deep enough.
