The melody, already rapid-fire agitprop in the style of early-80s Billy Bragg, intensifies, and a drumbeat. “So bend your knees and bow your heads/ Save your babies, here’s your future.” And then Harris is screaming, “Yeah, here’s your future,” and the guitars get loud and the drums get loud and if heads aren’t already nodding, they probably are now.

For me, The Thermals’ “Here’s Your Future” has one of the most riveting openings to a punk rock record I’ve heard in the last ten years. It’s also lyrically clumsy, politically ham-fisted, and rarely approaches subtlety. And I rarely go a week without listening to some part of it.

***

The core of the group, Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster, had played together in groups before this one; listening to The Thermals beside, say, the duo recordings they released under the name Hutch & Kathy, it’s pretty clear that the same sensibility is at work. 2006’s The Body The Blood The Machine, the album that “Here’s Your Future” opens, honed a particular direction for them, towards more thematically focused works; the album as meditation on a particular topic. The two albums that they’ve made since then, 2009’s Now We Can See and 2010’s Personal Life have both taken on larger conceptual frameworks but done so more elegantly, without some of the ham-fistedness that shows up here. Here, The Thermals have set these ten songs in a near-future United States overtaken by a particularly conservative and bigoted strain of Christianity.

The collages that dot the album’s artwork — an aesthetic descendent of Dead Kennedys collaborator Winston Smith and the juxtaposition-prone John Yates — are not subtle as they evoke rote Christian imagery and Bush-era culture clashes. The cover features Jesus with his eyes covered by a black bar, and other art features the Ten Commandments overlapping the Capitol’s architecture, a heavily redacted document with “ATTENTION ESCAPISTS!” at the top, and a car’s rear-view mirror where surging flames are visible.

Over the course of The Body The Blood The Machine’s ten songs, some of them frenetic in their tempo and others content to proceed with a stately chug, the society described on the album is delineated; the narrator of several of these songs vacillates between wanting to run from this society and (in “A Return to the Fold”) embracing it. If you’re thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four here, you’re in the right ballpark. There’s more than a little fascism in the society described — from the references to a “new master race” in the opener to the mention of “Nazi halos” in “I Might Need You to Kill.” Listening to these songs, it isn’t clear if Harris and Foster are suggesting that this is the end point of modern conservatism or if they’ve opted to go for a worst of all possible worlds, one where a kind of Christian Identity-based state has arisen. In the end, it might not matter — The Body The Blood The Machine is a powerful album, but it isn’t a particularly nuanced one.

***

I’ve never been sure why this album has gripped me as much as it does. I have friends who experienced in their youth a give-and-take between fundamentalist Christianity and punk rock, and others who have told stories of faiths that aren’t too far removed from the borderline-fascist creed referenced here. This year, I’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s terrifying account of growing up in a repressive branch of Christianity in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? I’ve read the political writers Will Saletan and Ross Douthat discuss the evolution of Christianity, and the ways in which it’s been adopted by the politically conservative.
This has not been my experience with Christianity. I grew up Episcopalian. There wasn’t much in the way of repression to be found there: no fear of damnation, no conflict between the books I read and the messages I heard in church on Sunday mornings. And while I can remember driving home from church with a Bad Religion tape playing on my car’s stereo, I never found much transgressive about my listening habits and the faith I’d been raised in, even as I got more and more into punk rock. About the only part of this album that really resonates with any vestige of my younger self is Harris’s line in “A Pillar of Salt” about “our filthy bodies,” though that (for me) had little to do with any concept of sin and desire.

***

For all that I find some of the imagery and wordplay here heavy-handed, though, there’s no rule that punk rock needs to be subtle. For every Against Me! playing textual and narrative games with their lyrics to a smart poltical end, there’s a Team Dresch, who well understand that the best political critiques are often the loudest. (“Hate The Christian Right” is an utterly brutal attack on a specific series of conservative politics; it’s loud and savage in its sentiments, and it’s impossible to forget.) The Body The Blood The Machine isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s not like it needs to be.

Even so, that doesn’t explain why this album hits so close to home for me — there are plenty of punk records that hit on a visceral level, but haven’t wormed themselves into my head the way this one has. My own mild philosophical differences with Episcopalianism seem insufficient grounds for my gut-level appreciation of such a gut-level attack on Christianity.

And yet, for all that I would probably point a newcomer to The Thermals to Now We Can See or Personal Life, it’s The Body The Blood The Machine that I return to again and again, looking for that same thrill and that same rush. I don’t think that this is an example of the tired old “punk rock became my religion” trope, but I also worry that it isn’t far from it, that my attraction to this album suggests that its fears of the allure of an all-controlling religious devotion are more resonant than I might like to admit. Alternately, as Harris sings with equal parts elation and terror: here’s your future.

Related Posts:

• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• A Zealot and a Poet
• Authors Deface Own Books for Charity
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: TO THE EXTREME BY VANILLA ICE
• Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.

Jóhannsson’s latest album, The Miners’ Hymns, is the soundtrack to the film of the same name by the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison. It’s his boldest work yet, ending on the hopeful, resonant themes that emerge from “The Cause of Labour Is the Hope of the World.” Over the course of the last few months, Jóhannsson has responded to questions I’ve sent; what follows is the result.

***

The Rumpus: Did the process of creating The Miners’ Hymns differ substantially from your previous work?

Jóhann Jóhannsson: What interested me was the idea of making a kind of requiem for a lost industry and for the human aspect of this. Coal mining was an important industry in the region for 200 years and over a few years in the ’80s it was more or less shut down with significant consequences for the community. In the North of England, there was a brass band in every village and the band members were mostly coal miners. The brass bands were the soundtrack to the coal miners’  lives, from cradle to grave. Even after the industry had disappeared, the brass bands still remained and are now manned by the sons and daughters of coal miners. I was interested in working with this heritage of brass music and it for me it was important to work with local players. We worked with the NASUWT Riverside Band, which has origins in the Pelton Fell Colliery band which was formed in 1870, so they represent 140 years of history.

Rumpus: The “requiem for a lost industry” idea seems to dovetail with some of the themes introduced on IBM 1401 and Fordlandia–were there themes or motifs that all three works share?

Jóhannsson: Yes, there are themes that relate to industry, technology, workers’ revolt and such things. Obsolete technologies and the industries etc. IBM 1401 and Fordlandia are intended as part of a series while Miners’ Hymns is on its own, but they do have a lot in common.

Rumpus: How did you first come into contact with Bill Morrison? Had you known him before work began on the film?

Jóhannsson: David Metcalfe from Forma originally approached me with the idea of doing an audiovisual piece working with the mining heritage of the north of England. Bill was one of the filmmakers he suggested as collaborators and as I’d loved his film Decasia, I was keen on working with him. I saw Decasia years ago at a film festival and I thought it was an amazing piece of work

Rumpus: What was the process of working with Morrison like?

Jóhannsson: We spent some time in the region, Bill researching local film archives and me working with local musicians. We talked about what kind of imagery we were interested in and the structure and so on, but the music was composed first and the film was edited to the music. We premiered the film in Durham Cathedral with live music and this was the first time I’d seen the finished film.

Rumpus: Do you feel that the music that you’ve written for films differs substantially from your more standalone work?

Jóhannsson: I approach things very much in the same way, whether it’s music for a film or one of my own albums. I don’t put a special hat on to write film music or for anything else. Of course writing for film places some restrictions on you, you generally don’t have a blank slate, there are certain parameters already laid out, such as structure that you have to follow to a certain extent. In the case of  The Miners’ Hymns, it was different because the music was written first, so the music laid out the structure of the film.

Rumpus: Much of your work that’s been released in the US was originally written to accompany films or theatrical productions. Do you think that someone listening to the music outside of this context is getting the full experience of it?

Jóhannsson: My albums are all created and intended as stand-alone pieces. Even though an album like Englabörn is based on music written for a play, it was significantly re-structured and rearranged for the album, creating something which hopefully stands on its own. The same goes for IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, which was written for a dancer, but always intended as a standalone piece as well. For me the choreography is like a branch that grows out of the original idea and the album is another branch. I don’t think one precludes the other and I think people will experience different levels of the pieces depending on how they are presented–as a concert performance, on record, or as theatrical performance –there’s no hierarchy, they’re all equal levels.

Rumpus: How do you balance music that’s complementary to a particular work with qualities that make it satisfying as a standalone work?

Jóhannsson: For a piece of music to work as an album you have to approach it on the medium’s own terms. For a soundtrack album like And in the endless pause… the music was extensively rearranged and re-recorded to make it work as an album.

Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, the arrangements on Dís stand out–do you plan to return to writing for a more rock-oriented ensemble?

Jóhannsson: Dís was a soundtrack record and soundtrack work gives you freedom to experiment with different sounds and styles. I like to use the opportunity when writing soundtracks to work with sounds I would perhaps stay away from on my solo albums. Some of the Dís record is closer to Apparat Organ Quartet, which is one of my side projects. AOQ released an album last year in Iceland, which will be released in Europe this autumn.

Rumpus: Does the music that you play in the Apparat Organ Quartet have any effect on your composition?

Jóhannsson: Apparat Organ Quartet is a collaborative project with four other composers, so there’s much more than just my voice in there. It’s outwardly quite different from my solo music, but there are a lot of things in common, if you dig deeper. For me there’s very little difference between AOQ and my solo work but I realize that may be a minority opinion. For me it’s a matter of instrumentation more than anything else. There are common threads like minimalism, krautrock and electro-acoustic music that inform both projects.

Rumpus: Besides the groups you were writing this piece for, did the music itself draw any influence from the traditional repertoire of brass bands?

Jóhannsson: I listened to quite a bit of brass music as I prepared for the piece and the music I connected to the most were the hymns – -this 19th century religious, Salvation Army music that the English brass bands performed a lot. The title of the piece comes from a hymn composed by a miner to commemorate a mining accident in the town of Gresford in the 1930s where hundreds of miners died–it’s well known in the region and is commonly called “The Miners’ Hymn.” It’s an incredibly affecting piece of music and when I heard it, the project kind of fell into place for me, it gave me a key to how to approach this–although I don’t refer to the hymn musically in any way, I just borrowed the title.

Rumpus: Are there any plans to continue the series that began with IBM 1401 and Fordlandia?

Jóhannsson: Yes, I’m working on the third installment now. It will be a 40 minute piece for symphony orchestra that will premiere in Winnipeg, Canada, on February 3rd. I will record it shortly after that and hopefully release [it] some time next year.

Related Posts:

• Songs of Our Lives: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy”
• The Rumpus Interview with Jesse Sykes
• Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine
• The Rumpus Interview with Boots Riley of The Coup
• Must We Hate Creed?

This conversation (a followup of sorts to an earlier one) also delves into his funk-inspired novel Please Step Back, the music of The Replacements, and his upcoming collection Celebrity Chekhov.

***

The Rumpus: I wanted to start out talking about your use and treatment of history. You’ve talked about Please Step Back‘s protagonist being inspired by Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield; when dealing with a fictional character inspired by real people, is your process of addition or of subtraction? Alternately: do you begin with a blank slate and add details taken from history, or do you begin with an existing figure and alter their life as needed?

Ben Greenman: I’ve used both approaches. So much depends on how familiar the history is. For Please Step Back, I took the real Sly, definitively – it started out as notes for a biography – and then shifted most of the details ten degrees to the right or the left so that it was a plausible alternative universe. After that, of course, there’s a long process of adding and subtracting – building in a private life, building away from the idea that you’re just seeing a documentary through a prism.

But the other approach is just as interesting. A few books back, I wrote a story called “In the Air Room.” It was in Zoetrope, accompanied by a very nice William Eggleston photograph. Anyway, in that case, I had the idea of doing something about a misunderstood artist who creates a wonderfully intricate work for an ungrateful and capricious patron. The idea was in my head because of my dealings with publishers, and my own temper issues, and I started to sketch it out. Then, as the story was marinating, I found an article about James McNeil Whistler and this art room he made, The Peacock Room, for Fredrick Leyland, a British ship magnate and art collector. In that case, I had my little vessel, this vase of a plot, and I immediately started to put flowers in it from real life.

Rumpus: Is more traditional biography — or historical nonfiction in general — a form that you have an interest in returning to at some point?

Greenman: I don’t think I have the temperament to write a traditional biography. When I was writing about a fake Sly Stone and basing some of my invention on the real Sly Stone, I frequently ran up against two phenomena. First, that when the research trail petered out, I would just invent something. Second, that when I found information that reflected poorly on the subject, who was someone I loved, I started to feel defensive on his behalf, and wanted to protect him from exposure. Neither of those is a good trait for a biographer.

Rumpus: In terms of the Peacock Room article that you found — did you come across it while doing research for the story, or was it more serendipitous that it crossed your path?

Greenman: More serendipitous. I was doing research on early aviation, pilots and dirigibles, and I stumbled across the Peacock Room story, which resembled (or maybe I should say completed) a picture that was coming together in my mind.

Rumpus: Moving from there to a larger canvas: The What He’s Poised to Do story “Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That” is primarily set on a lunar colony; “The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy…” has “Australindia” as its postmark. How much of the histories and points of divergence of these worlds did you need to determine?

Greenman: You mean how much reality has to be in unreality? I’d say that it has to be mostly real: what is extraordinary about those locations, about those times and places, have to fade away pretty quickly so that they seem like normal places. The strangeness of them remains, of course, and hopefully it gives the stories a certain quality: alienation, oddness, a face glimpsed in a funhouse mirror. In those cases, I don’t spend a huge amount of time with the internal consistency of those imagined worlds. I don’t draw intricate maps. I don’t design Australindian currency. But I know that those things – maps, currency – exist.

Rumpus: Similarly, in Please Step Back, did you have a sense of how the artists you’d created might have affected existing bands’ music in ways that deviated from the historical record? (Or, thematically, does Rock Foxx’s nature as a character in a novel mean that, ultimately, his pursuit of creating era-changing music would always be futile?)

Greenman: That was one of the best imaginative exercises hanging off the side of Please Step Back. The interesting thing is that it’s a world without Sly Stone. He’s the only major artist I subtracted. In that world, James Brown exists. Marvin Gaye exists. Smokey Robinson exists. The Beatles and the Stones exist. So they are all influenced by Rock Foxx, my fictional funk-rock star. There’s an important exception to this rule that explains the rule. When George Clinton came along, when he established and presided over the Parliament-Funkadelic empire, he was heavily influenced by Sly Stone, obviously. In my book, I wanted to imagine that younger generation of funk band, to think about how that younger band would have inspired or drained the older funk pioneer. To do that, I couldn’t just have Rock Foxx meet up with Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Glenn Goins and other funkateers, so I invented a band called Anchor, and made them a near-copy of P-Funk, just as I made Rock Foxx and the Foxxes a near-copy of Sly and the Family Stone.

That’s the peek behind the curtain. The message on the curtain is something like this: Yes, fake things influenced real things.

Rumpus: What He’s Poised to Do takes as its epigraph the opening lines from The Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait.” What influence does music have over your writing that doesn’t necessarily address music directly?

Greenman: Rhythm, sequencing, energy, knowing when to stop, knowing when to drop your foot on the gas, accepting leaps of illogic that work because they have a perfect ring to them, a poetry that defines (and in fact evades) plain old reason. Also this: it always seemed unfair to me that a pop songwriter could go directly to the heart of a listener and stay there so much more efficiently than an author could with a reader.

Rumpus: And am I reading too much into things if I inquire about a possible connection between Pleased to Meet Me‘s “Alex Chilton” and the Letters With Character project?

Greenman: Yes. I mean, maybe. It’s possible there is one, but not consciously. You mean between the idea of being in love with a song as some kind of synecdoche for being in love with a musician, and then transferring that to the reader/character/author relationship?

Rumpus: I do indeed. How long is the Letters With Character project intended to last?

Greenman: Forever. I imagine it will ebb and flow, but the plan is for it to outlast the Internet.

Rumpus: Did your process of writing the stories in What He’s Poised to Do mirror the process of the characters’ writing their letters within the stories? Specifically, I’m thinking about the differences between writing something on a computer and writing something by hand — the differences in these two methods of putting words onto paper, and how they can affect the text.

Greenman: Yes, but no, but yes. I didn’t write longhand. I don’t write longhand anymore. But I use the notepad function on the iPhone, or snippets of voice memos, to catch phrases that I like, particularly dialogue (overheard or invented). And then there’s a more conventional, protracted kind of composition where I block out a paragraph and polish that monkey-fighter until it shines.

Rumpus: Where does the upcoming Celebrity Chekhov fit in to all of this?

Greenman: It fits in there, like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle, though it has brighter colors. It explores some of these same issues, of course. What is the real historical record? What is the relationship between celebrity and art? Between reality and fiction? It’s a little different from Please Step Back, at least in conception, in that it comes at this problem from the other direction. Rather than saying “Here is a pop-culture phenomenon that deserves permanent enshrinement in high literature,” it says “Here is high literature that deserves to be fueled (and sometimes overturned) by celebrity.” The project here is two-fold, at least: it’s to see what happens to these timeless, invincible stories when celebrities are inserted into them, and to see what happens to these celebrities when they are filled by the content of these timeless, invincible stories.

Rumpus: When did you begin work on these stories? And what provided the initial impetus?

Greenman: The initial impetus was a joke, but a serious joke. I started to worry that except for Shakespeare, the eternal masters will be read with decreasing frequency. Then I started to wonder about what would rejuvenate them, and then it struck me: celebrities. Then everyone would care about Chekhov again, because Lindsay Lohan or Mel Gibson was in there. From that seed, the whole crazy plant grew. I think there are several different threads in there, all twisted around one another: serious literary recontextualization, satire, inquiry into celebrity, a reconsideration of certain aspects of translation.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Ben Greenman
• MoMA Event Tomorrow
• Writing About Home
• Dale Peck Gets Freedom: A Subjective Account of the Mischief + Mayhem Party
• Notable New York, This Week 6/28 – 7/4

It doesn’t hurt that Throne has a feeling to it at once frenzied and contemplative: looped beats, overdubbed choirs made up of Simkoff’s voice, sampled sound clips, and a smartly played banjo all make appearances. But it’s hard to imagine this album coming to be in any situation other than as a solo project: it can be messy but, to these ears, never less than fascinating. Consider the ominous way Simkoff delivers a line like “This world was made for ending” (on “Planes Like Vultures”), or the conclusion to “Canto XXXVI”, elevated by the presence of lines like “We will lift her up/ We will lift her body up.” A strain of surreal mysticism runs through Throne, and even when the album doesn’t work — when songs fall away into lengthy sound-effect gaps or ambient noises overtake melodies — it never stops being interesting. Simkoff’s voice goes from whispered to a broken sort of cry, and it’s abetted by the banjo that runs alongside it, providing a visceral and sometimes percussive accompaniment.

The live version of Le Loup that began touring in late 2007 was something altogether different. Seven strong, most contributing vocals, Le Loup’s evolution into a proper band began with a lineup that forcefully translated the songs written and recorded by Simkoff into something much more expansive. And it worked: I can remember being fixed on the band to the exclusion of anything else as they played “I Had a Dream I Died.,” the song that brings Throne to a close. Simkoff’s voice, unadorned or looped over itself, has one kind of power, but a half-dozen voices, male and female, declaiming those same lyrics, brings to them a proper force. a half-dozen voices singing “This is the end/ Reckless young energy,” the music falling away beneath them.

Earlier in that same song, Simkoff sang, “Tell all your friends you love them without complaint.” Throne was a solo album, yes, but one that ultimately reconnected with a larger group. Which makes it seem fitting, even logical, that Le Loup’s second album has the title Family. The group’s lineup is down to five from the seven-piece version that held my attention two autumns ago: May Tabol and Nicole Keenan have left the band, the former having assembled a group of her own, called Pree. (The group’s present lineup consists of Simkoff, Jim Thomson, Robby Sahm, Christian Ervin, and Michael Ferguson.) While one might expect Family to share the visceral immediacy of Throne, the first impression one gets is of music that draws closely to a devotional impulse. These are harmonies that sound suited for the walls of churches and shrines as opposed to rock clubs: “Saddle Mountain,” which opens the album, seems encoded with a traditional sense of balladry, and the album’s title track is elevated by a series of vocal combinations that lend it a hallucinatory, pastoral feeling.

Family, though, is filled with subtle moments that would not have been possible in the previous version of the group: the swooning vocal section that ends the title track, for example, or “A Celebration,” which closes the album. The latter moves forward on a frenetic beat, voices singing at some points, chanting at others. But two-thirds of the way through, the bulk of the music drops away for a dialogue between piano and guitar, wordless vocals slowly rising to an ecstatic resolution. Its final ninety seconds encapsulate all that’s come before, and then comes the winding down, vocals the last to fade.

It’s the kind of ending that one might associate with the live version of a song: an extended coda, sections allowing the instruments room to breathe, a big finish. And while other moments from the album — the transition from “Family” into “Forgive Me,” for instance — are indicative of Family as a well-made record, “A Celebration” is unquestionably the work of a band that understands their own live dynamics. Alternately: “A Celebration” stands as the point of demarcation between the initial version of Le Loup and the full-band version that succeeded it.

2009’s Le Loup is a more consistent entity than the solo version that preceded it. Yet it isn’t without flaws of its own. There’s a distinctive sound to Throne; Family, though more consistent, is also more elusive and, in places, indistinct. It’s a little easier to categorize than its predecessor; it’s a little more conducive to shorthand descriptions. But it’s also more listenable and, ultimately as satisfying as Throne. So in the end, that  may be the lesson taught by this version of Le Loup: sometimes, you need to hand something off to others in order to enrich it; at other times, perhaps, you don’t. And after the last notes of Family fade away, a sense of anticipation for what might come next remains.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

A long scream ends the title song of Are We Not Horses?, the 2006 album from the Toronto band Rock Plaza Central. It’s a horrific, guttural utterance, the sound of something alienated from what it had once been. That’s Chris Eaton’s voice: he’s the singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter. Eaton’s voice can also be heard in the words of the novels The Inactivist, a study of urban idealism, and especially The Grammar Architect, a surreal re-imagining of Thomas Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from what’s inside: Hardy’s account of starcrossed love has been shifted into a postmodern Toronto populated by downcast gods and forlorn recipients of body modification gone awry.

Rock Plaza Central‘s new album, …at the Moment of our Most Needing or If Only They Could Turn Around, They Would Know They Weren’t Alone, wears the same cover-version aesthetic on its sleeve. In this case, it’s William Faulkner’s Light In August that finds itself re-interpreted. As with The Grammar Architect, this isn’t immediately apparent: there are warnings about “the words of handsome men” and references to a never ending pursuit of an elusive quarry, both of which resonate with Light In August‘s narrative, but the album’s lyrics remain vague, creating a sort of outline of Faulkner’s situations into which other names, faces, and events can be substituted.

Chris Eaton is not the first artist to manipulate the tensions between disorientation and tuneful bliss. He is, however, one of the few to do so across multiple disciplines, and it’s impossible to separate the concerns articulated in his music from those that occur in his fiction, or vice versa. In The Grammar Architect, an opera singer named Anne-Sophie is abducted and subjected to a series of operations that effectively render her inhuman. There’s a similar blending of identity, of the organic and the mechanical, in the concept behind Rock Plaza Central‘s Are We Not Horses?, an album told from the perspective of robot horses waging war on angels. Are We Not Horses? has beautiful moments, in particular the triumphant “My Children, Be Joyful” and the stark “When We Go, How We Go (Part 1),” but there’s a sense of intentional alienation throughout. This is not necessarily an album in which robots and angels are used metaphorically: when you hear a love song, it never quite leaves your mind that this is a love song sung by a robot horse. And when Eaton delivers a line like “separated angels from their wings,” it’s made much more visceral than one might expect, the cracks in his voice summoning sinew and bone.

In 2007, I interviewed Eaton for the now-defunct music website Paper Thin Walls. His lyrical imagery and his penchant for subjects nonhuman and inhuman were among the topics up for discussion. “Robots and circus freaks let me talk about identity in a much broader sense,” he explained, and went on to root those concerns in something much more specific. “Half the time I’m just struggling with whether or not I’m a real author, or that I play in a real band. I’m certainly unable to make a living off it. So is it more of a hobby than what I really am?”

Though Are We Not Horses? attracted the group a wider audience, it was far from Rock Plaza Central‘s first album: their discography extends back to a 1996 cassette-only release, and a recent show at Brooklyn’s The Bell House drew heavily on 2003′s fine The World Was Hell to Us. It also, surprisingly, found the group playing in a far louder register than one might expect, given their music’s roots in folk and country instrumentation.

Listening to The World Was Hell to Us — and the bittersweet “The Things That Bind You” and the stark, crystalline “You As a Landscape” are two of the best songs Eaton has penned — also reveals something else: Eaton’s voice has grown more raw with time. This isn’t the slow weathering of a Bob Dylan or the heightened stylization of a Tom Waits. Instead, it feels like an inverted post-punk progression — rather than the heart-on-sleeve screamer slowly learning to croon, we’re hearing the singer-songwriter discovering how to weave ugliness into his delivery. It’s an odd thing to compliment, but looking at Eaton’s body of work, it makes sense: though Rock Plaza Central‘s music has been heard by more and more people in recent years, their albums have grown as intentionally disorienting as their frontman’s novels.

“I think my music used to be more linear and the fiction was all over the place,” Eaton said in 2007. “But the two of them are meeting in a place I really like, something that still doesn’t depend on a linear storyline but probably tells the story a lot more vividly. I’m into showing snapshots of life that hopefully combine into a photo album that tells a story. And in both cases, I feel like the snapshots could be rearranged and reinterpreted by readers and listeners, and that’s exciting to me, too.”

That aspect of reinterpretation also suffuses Rock Plaza Central‘s recent …at the Moment of our Most Needing. In discussing how he developed the cover-novel aspects of The Grammar Architect, Eaton explained, “I cut up little plot points, reading the original book and dropping little sentences into the hat. I didn’t use character names, just things like ‘Daughter falls in love with architect. Father upset.’ And then I tried as often as possible to quote passages from the original, and even lots of passages from other genre fiction.” Like Dirty Projectors’ 2007 Rise Above, …at the Moment of our Most Needing feels less like a direct translation of Light In August and more of a transmission of a remembered version of the same, with certain themes and moments resonating more strongly than others.

The album shifts from banjo-driven campfire songs to broad-stroke spaghetti-western atmospherics. Its enunciation is closer in tone to The World Was Hell to Us than Are We Not Horses? — there’s a precision to the playing and sharper distinctions from song to song. (Are We Not Horses?, as befits its concept-album status, feels like a lengthier meditation on its characters and images.) Eaton’s rapid-fire, panicked delivery of “Holy Rider” abounds with a nervous emotion offset by the sweep of strings, his voice only rendered calmer for a moment, his line “help me find her” honestly desperate.

The ugliness hasn’t been forgotten, though. Listen to the raggedness of Eaton’s voice on “The Hot Blind Earth,” which brings the album to a close. “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth,” he sings, a line borrowed from Faulkner — though in this case, it’s not Light In August but As I Lay Dying. And as the mood turns redemptive, the music behind that voice segues into an upswell, something like an anarchist orchestra playing their take on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”.

In the course of discussing The Grammar Architect, Eaton mentioned the character of Burke, a writer who “thinks his friends’ lives are really boring. Or he doesn’t understand them and needs good motivation. So when he’s retelling their stories, he embellishes. After Anne-Sophie breaks up with him, for example, he makes her into a monster. As the dumped are wont to do. Simply by writing them down, he makes them true.”

Chris Eaton’s voice, then, brings with it the sound of the horror of being re-imagined, a painful rebirth via rewrite. It’s a deeply modern concern, and it’s one that Eaton’s explorations have translated into a body of work that’s both aesthetically complex and deeply accessible. Although for all of the intellectual pleasures and terrors that Eaton summons up, it’s still the visceral physicality of his grittier deliveries that haunts the most.

Related Posts:

• Faulkner Goes Postal
• The Wishing Tree
• This here post is for the Faulkner Fans
• Multicolored The Sound and the Fury Finally Published
• Listen to Faulkner Read