The latest album by Seattle's the Dead Science asks a lot of questions, the foremost being, "What the fuck?" You've got Sam Mickens' voice, which blends showtunesy brio with high-strung jitters, and makes him sound like Judy Garland in the throes of some dire psychosexual discomfort. For source material, you've got Wu-Tang Clan and Marvel Comics (the latter already looming large in the former's pantheon of mythology), leading to song titles like "Make Mine Marvel" and lyrics like "Villainaire/ Ice Grillionaire." And you've got the music itself: disarticulated guitar scrollwork full of awkwardly splayed chords and spidery progressions.
The easy explanation for these juxtapositions would be indie irony-- a throwaway gag where a cynical appropriation of otherness masquerades as thematic depth-- or a parlor trick with archetypal collisions. But this isn't going to be that easy. Mickens writes insightfully about rap music for Seattle's The Stranger, and however inscrutable it is, this record has the marks of genuine investment. So again: What the fuck. The short answer is that this is music by music critics, for music critics. Dig this rather leading question that Mickens asked the RZA in a Stranger interview: "Do you feel like Bobby Digital is a format in which you're looking at the more serious value of things like Marvel Comics-- things that people might be real deep on as kids and then come to greater understandings of later in life?" On Villainaire, Mickens attempts to answer his own question.
As someone who, approaching 30, has begun to seriously revisit the comics and rap music (especially Wu-Tang) that informed his developing perceptions of heroes, villains, power, and weakness, I'm sympathetic. It can't be a coincidence that superhero movies and the comics industry have enjoyed an incredible mainstream resurgence post-9/11, and these ostensibly childish fantasies, which reveal collective hopes and fears, are bursting with current relevance. But music is better at insinuation than analysis, and Mickens' themes seem like they'd be more fruitfully framed as a dissertation. When he sings, amid the needling guitars and ghoulish strings of "Monster Island Czars", "Daydream of being married to/ A wave of bullets racing through my body," we at least catch a whiff of some kind of point about violence-as-fantasy, and "gangster white walls" is a terrifically compacted lyric that operates on at least three levels of significance. But when he quotes "Triumph" and sneaks in a reference to "golden arms" on the slithering chamber rock of "Make Mine Marvel", it smells of red herring.
Villainaire's ambitious themes are partially stillborn, but the music itself is grotesquely alive. The Dead Science occupy a very specific and yet-to-be-properly-named caste of art-rock (I propose Theater of the Insane) characterized by queasy vibrato, tangled guitars, abstruse transgressive themes, allegiance to Scott Walker, and supplementary non-rock instrumentation (e.g. the harp runs preceding the swarming guitar attack of "Throne of Blood (The Jump Off)"). They reside there alongside Xiu Xiu, Parenthetical Girls, and Shudder to Think. It's hard to imagine, but Mickens' voice is even more uncompromising than Jamie Stewart's or Craig Wedren's. At once lacy and flinty, it isn't softened by lush flutters like Stewart's, which is particularly apparent on "Fabulous Muscles"-style, vanishing ballads like "Lamentable". Nor is it fortified by Wedren's operatic fluency, whose cameo on "Death Duel Productions" emphasizes how rigidly Mickens' voice sits astride the careening music. His voice is as ambiguous as his themes and shattered arrangements, all of which conspire to render Villainaire such an intriguing, exasperating, fitfully rewarding record.
