Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up with a new name for the genre known as "post-rock." Now, genre labels are never very descriptive, and usually serve merely as a crutch for writers and a denial target for musicians ("We're not emo!" a thousand bespectacled bands cry). But they do serve some purpose as a sort of critical shorthand-- I tell you a band is new-wave synth-pop, and your brain instantly dials up an approximate framework for the music at hand.
Post-rock is an especially faulty term, however, since it says almost nothing about a band's sound, other than it being somehow "after rock." It's sort of like describing an especially tasty dinner as being post-lunch. What else can we call it then? One could go back to the genre's obvious roots in King Crimson-style complexity and call it neo-prog, or something more futuristic, like prog-o-tron. If it's important to tip a hat to the music's German origins, Ameri-Kraut might catch on. Or we could all just tell it like it is and label it pretentious-core. I'm open to suggestions.
All this semantics-wrassling is provoked by 90 Day Men, an act that many would most likely lump into post-rock or math-rock circles. On To Everybody, their second album, the St. Louis quartet may possibly be addressing this problem of classification by naming a track, "We Blame Chicago," indicting the geographic center of post-rock with charges of beating the genre into clichédom. That's just a wild guess, and only the 90 Day Men know the real story behind the title, but To Everybody comes across as just such a challenge to the scene.
The first three minutes of the opening track, "I've Got Designs on You," led me to think that the album had little in store, with Dianogah's melodic bass, Don Caballero's gymnastic drumming and an irritating pinched whine for vocals. However, after eight minutes of bobsled run twists and turns (sorry, too much Olympics), I was hooked. What happened? Well, the addition of Brian Case's textured guitars and more restrained counterpoint vocals didn't hurt. But the real kicker is Andy Lansangan's piano, which slowly enters the fray before taking control and allowing the composition to achieve liftoff.
Piano, you say? Big frickin' deal, you say. I'm gonna go see what else Pitchfork reviewed today, you say. Shut up and sit down, I say. While the piano might not be the most advanced of instruments, Lansangan uses it to great effect on To Everybody, adding much-needed warmth and melody to 90 Day Men's sound. Where the band's previous effort, 1999's (It (Is) It) Critical Band, occasionally sank into the sludge of an overly busy rhythm section, Lansangan's inventive playing has the band in a much more balanced state instrumentally.
No one song showcases their new strengths like the aforementioned "We Blame Chicago," a piano and wah-wah-driven piece that swoops and darts through two tuneful movements, disintegrates into noise, then returns triumphantly to the original theme. 90 Day Men function like a musical assembly line, with each member playing simple phrases that add up to a cohesive and complex whole. While many bands that take this approach sound overly choreographed and rigid, Lansangan's jazzy style keeps things loose, giving off at least the appearance of improvisational energy.
"St. Theresa in Ecstasy" and "A National Car Crash" follow a stretched out version of the same blueprint, slowly assembling an intricate pyramid of sound before destroying it all like an angry toddler, only to rebuild it even higher. While the former says less than it probably should over its near nine-minute length, the latter closes the album with a fiery display of tension-release dynamics.
If 90 Day Men have a weakpoint, it's in their vocals, which are predominantly used as just another color of yarn to knit into their musical scarf. That most singing gets buried in the mix is perhaps a wise decision, as only the brief, aerobic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" reaches minimum singalong-ability. When the vocals are too prominently displayed they distract from the music beneath, or at worst, are wincingly melodramatic ("Alligator," where the band's prog side gets the best of them).
90 Day Men are also smart enough to know that listeners can only handle so much of their dense, sinister sound in one sitting, and keep the album at a lean, mean forty-minute length. And despite a few missteps, To Everybody indicates that the 90 Day Men are a band to watch in the Ameri-Kraut arena, using familiar ingredients but to greater effect. It may even end up being one of the better prog-o-tron releases of 2002. What do you think, are they catching on?
