Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. Despite its commonality, it’s still a risky maneuver: perhaps playing in such a stylistic straitjacket has made a band incapable of doing anything else. Even if it’s an artistically successful record, it can alienate old fans without attracting new ones. Most relevant to Ceremony, it’s a card you only get to play once. Six years after they could be accurately described as "powerviolence," the Bay Area group released their John Goodmanson-produced Matador debut *Zoo—*a slog through boggy, primordial punk, interesting for the sole fact that it was made by a former powerviolence band. Ceremony undergoes another drastic change on The L-Shaped Man, but it cannot be leniently judged relative to Violence Violence. They’re now just one of the thousands of indie rock bands that really want to sound like Joy Division, and sounding no more engaged with their source material than the average dude plucking an Unknown Pleasures graphic T off the rack at Hot Topic.
Mind you, Ceremony are on their fifth record and are named after a Joy Division song. But at the very least, the veritable return to their roots makes sense within the context of The L-Shaped Man. Ceremony are also one of the thousands of indie rock bands making a conceptual breakup record; and in these situations, such a breakup is assumed to be so catastrophic that it totally dismantles one’s self-construct and leaves nothing but foundation. Joy Division lyrics, advice from your father, bumper stickers that read "all things pass"—everything you’ve been led to think is trite once you’re out of your teens might actually reveal themselves to be the truth.
There’s no way to judge the authenticity of Ross Farrar’s emotions on The L-Shaped Man. But how can he can be exempt on an album where everything feels like facade? In particular, the facade inherent in Ceremony’s own name, as they grab at the most obvious signifiers of their idols and pass them off as their own. For one thing, Farrar’s vocals are now unrecognizable, or only recognizable as Ian Curtis karaoke. To be fair, Curtis is a natural touchstone for a punk rock carny barker, as his enduring qualities—the militaristic cadences, the claustrophobic melodies—can be approximated without much technical ability.
But you can’t fake his command or intensity or sonorousness, though Farrar tries. Or maybe he doesn’t try hard enough. The lyrics are delivered with honesty and presumed urgency. They are also proof that those qualities can be less important than thinking before you talk. The dishwater-gray ambience of "Exit Fears" implies sleepless nights filled with lingering regret, while Farrar moans, "The pain will leave in the night/ Memories return in the light"—which seems to express the exact opposite of what he means. "The root of the world is in the red heart," "you saw yourself walking with no one else and it scared you"—they all aspire to be aphorisms and fade upon impact like a tweet never to be favorited. The album title itself is indicative of Farrar making observations without any insight—men are generally L-shaped, but...so?
The lack of resonance is even more obvious in Farrar’s newfound tone, a monster mash of alternating cartoonish bellow and honk which doesn’t sound like Curtis or Paul Banks so much as the dude from Editors drunkenly imitating Paul Banks trying to sing like Ian Curtis. Of all Farrar’s means of cheating towards cogency—repetition of lyrics that just can’t bear the attempts at establishing portent, lending numerous song titles a definitive article to import significance—the most absurd is his Jay McInerney-like tendency to speak almost entirely in the second person. Call it Turn on the Bright Lights, Big City.
As a working unit, Ceremony still play with customary, clumsy enthusiasm. The terse drumrolls, plangent guitar fills, and basslines that are all thumbs—it’s all here and played with the expected looseness of a former hardcore band that moved onto garage rock and is now learning post-punk on the fly. It occasionally coalesces into a surf-goth hybrid that at least justifies John Reis being roped into this. Who knows what Ceremony expected of the former Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt frontman, but his production might be more overmatched than mismatched: the confused melodies Farrar strews over the piano plunking of "Hibernation" and the wayward guitar leads in "Root of the World" can generously be heard as an experiment in avant-garde atonality. Ceremony would’ve been better off phoning a different guy from Drive Like Jehu—put Mark Trombino behind the drums or the boards and he could provide a high-velocity, low-viscosity sleekness that would make relatively hooky outliers like "The Separation" and "Bleeder" go incognito on satellite radio as enjoyably derivative post-pop-punk.
The L-Shaped Man does have an advantage over Zoo, in that it’s interesting in the way any true debacle is, where a band’s conviction is either impervious to any kind of outside intervention or just not subject to it. Just look at the album cover: almost immediately after Ceremony revealed The L-Shaped Man, fans noticed its too-hilarious-to-be-intentional similarity to a gag from the "A Millhouse Divided" episode of "The Simpsons." This is better known as the "Can I Borrow a Feeling" episode, an unfortunate coincidence seeing as how we’re talking about a record whose entire aesthetic is on loan. It’s even more serendipitous in light of the exact scene with the offending Pictionary attempt—there we have Kirk Van Houten, on the verge of a calamitous divorce, yelling at a dinner party crowd who reacts to his inept visual rendering of "dignity" with embarrassed silence. Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.
