Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson is classically pretentious-- "We want to be dissidents of the people to whom we should most propitiously belong," he told Richie Unterberger in 1993-- but he's always been smart enough to realize that rock is an essentially dumb medium. When hippies ascended the throne in 1967, his response was called "War Sucks". Kangaroo?, a 1981 collaboration with conceptual artists Art & Language about Marxism and creativity, pointed out that art didn't kill Jackson Pollock, a car crash did. Mayo Thompson, like Dan Bejar of Destroyer, doesn't take the poetry of counterculture lying down, damn it. Some bands are proud to buck trends, but Mayo's death drive is that he can't stop until he challenges hegemony, which is usually several steps after he's stopped making sense.
So call Sighs Trapped by Liars another exercise in hypothetical revolution. The lingua franca here is waifish folk-rock with a hint of psych-- Thompson's version of indie-pop, maybe. (There are are no less than five songs about the power of mirrors, and indie-pop is nothing without its propensity to reflect.) The band sometimes sounds a little too lax to be rebels, but they have moments, particularly the Byrdsian "Fairest of All" or the dissonant lounge-bossa of "The Big Vacation". Thompson has stepped down from the mic for the first time, leaving vocals to the sweet-sounding Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang. The swap makes Red Krayola softer on the ears, but washes out the charm Thompson's voice used to bring the recordings-- an aloof-sounding near-falsetto that fumbled through lines like they were going by too fast on a teleprompter. Lyrically, there's some inanity for spice ("Fuck the fucking cat") and acid for levity ("There are 40,000 words on a chair"), but most of the liner notes scan with all the charm of a textbook. Of course, you could call the gap between Art & Language's words and Thompson's childishly simple songs funny-- clever, even-- and it is. But you could also call it exhausting, which it can be after 45 minutes.
Either way, it's one of the band's more accessible releases, and it's better than Red Krayola's album from 2006, Introduction. Mayo Thompson's problem will never be relevance. He jumped into post-punk after years of silence and ended up playing with members of the Raincoats and Essential Logic; for a while, he played with Pere Ubu. In the 90s, he joined up with the avant-rock scene centered around Chicago, absorbing people like David Grubbs, John McEntire, and Jim O'Rourke (the latter two play here). Granted, that Chicago scene isn't exactly au courant anymore, but Thompson's kept up his quiet protest long enough to turn it into a kind of insular world, a cottage industry. (I sometimes wonder if his increasing solitude isn't just a sign that underground rock has lost a unifying drive.) He's been more focused in the past, but no doubt he'll find a world to define himself in opposition to again soon.
