A rare occurrence in the cutthroat world of the Rock and Roll is something I'll call the Sideman Bar Mitzvah: a secondary player in a once-popular band that goes on to success with his own project (after death, or breakup, or incarceration) which stops the initial cash cow from lactating. The SBM happens occurs about as often as a triple play-- for every Wilco and New Order, there's like 98 Scottie Pippen bands like Preston School of Industry or The Kelley Deal 6000. Yeah, my profession is largely to blame for this phenomenon, as we're always ready to pounce on an artist's former affiliations. But a lot of the time, these bands' records are Exhibit A as to just why Mr. or Ms. Sideperson wasn't the go-to guy/gal back in the good old days.
Hey, what a coincidence! Here we have Enon, the band of guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist John Schmersal, former second banana in a little outfit called Brainiac. If you consult your handy portable hipster encyclopedia, you'll find Brainiac alongside Joy Division and the Minutemen under the heading of 'taken too soon'-- groups whose career trajectories were cut abruptly short by that sickle-wielding bastard Death. When Timmy Taylor became an automobile accident casualty statistic (flying is safer, kids!), Brainiac, sadly, flatlined along with him, inspiring years of reverent webboard discussion over what might have been.
Unfortunately, the cultish buzz around Brainiac's short career has also virtually ensured that any future Schmersal project would have to operate under the long shadow of his old Dayton purple-hair spaz-synth-rock days. With preconceptions placing him far behind the starting line, it would take a pretty good album to force us writers to delete our pre-Enon Schmersal biographies and stop using lame 'rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Brainiac' intros. Luckily, High Society is just such an album, perhaps more varied and consistent than anything the defunct Daytonites ever released.
Of course, I'm not going to swear off references to the B-word yet, in part because Enon still sound a hell of a lot like Schmersal's previous employer. Given that Schmersal's epileptic seizure guitar work was such a huge part of Brainiac's herky-jerky sound, this is no big surprise, but Enon's also borrowed a great deal of Taylor's vocal tics and mini-Moog diddles on their work to date. Believo! took this to an almost uncomfortably eerie level, with Schmersal appropriating all of Taylor's cast of vocal characters-- castrati jazz singer, seductive cyborg-Jagger, Prozac-industrial screamer-- for his own performances. Mired in the same gloom-and-doom electronics of Brainiac's later work and sorely lacking Taylor's considerable charisma, Believo! only took off when Schmersal tapped into his own literal and figurative voice on "Conjugate the Verbs" and "For the Sum of It."
High Society still has the occasional throwback tune, like the manic hip-swing of "Pleasure and Privilege" and the ominous march against soda pop "Carbonation," but it largely exhibits Schmersal taking his first firm steps towards building an independent identity. The opening double shot makes this abundantly clear, with the hard-rock crunch of "Old Dominion" sliding his falsetto into an ominous coda and "Count Sheep" broadcasting his surprisingly delicate croon. The album represents a musical shift toward electronic-tinged rock rather than Believo!'s rock-tinged electronic, but Schmersal throws himself with equal aplomb into the loungy strings and Pink Floyd sax solo of the title track and the almost-"Jessie's Girl" radio rock of "Sold!"
While Schmersal is coming out like that creepy Levi's bellybutton commercial, the real clincher of High Society is Enon's newest member, Toko Yasuda, formerly one-half of The Lapse. Providing the same knockout injection of S-E-X-X that Taylor lent Brainiac, Yasuda is a Barbie girl in a Macintosh world, warning her robotic paramour on "Disposable Parts" that she'll "throw you away when the flavor goes out." Contracting out microphone duties allows Schmersal more time to rock the vintage keys on "Shoulder" and "In This City," creating prime cuts of what the latest memos have told me I should label 'electroclash.'
If all the genre-name bocce ball leads you to believe that High Society has got more personalities than Sybil, you'd be right. But the entire affair is kept cohesive by (cheesy as it sounds) a rather upbeat mood-- a dance record for the hooded sweatshirt crowd. It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore. Rather than lamenting what could've been with Brainiac, High Society says it's time to throw out that memorial black armband and Timmy Taylor R.I.P. commemorative plate, 'cause maybe they were just the warmup act for Enon all along.
