ADHD Urinal Piss-Match

Lincoln Le Fevre and the Insiders get competitive



Like a lot of great musicians, Lincoln Le Fevre has ideas about music. Not the vague, ecstasy-high fluff that we hear from the Australian Idol set like “music is what I feel in my bones”, but concrete theories about what music is, and what it’s supposed to be. “There are so many ways to value music.” Lincoln told A Fine Line recently. “Some see it as art, where the avant garde needs to constantly seek to break new dogmas; some as a thing to feel and dance to; others see it as a display of technical proficiency where learning to play music is not much more than a couple of little boys trying to see who can piss the highest at the urinal.”

Lincoln’s new group, the semi-eponymous Lincoln Le Fevre and the Insiders, don’t shy completely away from the urinal piss-match of guitar solos. But a cursory glance at their myspace reveals that the music has more to it than schoolyard shenanigans: namely, great pop hooks, an alt-country vibe and a good dose of down-the-pub storytelling. This last aspect is no accident: “for me [music is] about communicating something, and telling a story.” Says Lincoln. “I'm not much of a lyrical poet, so my songs usually have one quite literal meaning to them, but I try to give them depth. Sometimes they're autobiographical, but mostly they're just stories.”

In “Best Friends Girl”, one of the group’s myspace tracks, Lincoln tells the archetypal story of the bloke smitten by his mate’s missus. The plot is simple, with an obvious twist and a happy ending backed by a campfire acoustic riff, but the song is great because it’s sung in the first person, allowing Lincoln to explore the blokey delusion with which the protagonist denies his forbidden crush. Notwithstanding the country music aping plot arch, there’s something very Australian about this song. Lincoln explains: “I grew up as a bogan, maybe, but nowhere near the country.” The alt-country tag sits uneasily with him: “I love alt-country, and it has certainly inspired the new sound, but it's a totally appropriated persona. It's just an opportunity to tell stories in a context.”

That context is inevitably Australian, and Lincoln belts out his tunes in a distinctive Aussie accent that avoids the cringe-inducing twang of Missy Higgins. It says a lot about the American origins of rock music that this was a conscious choice by Lincoln, who originally sang like a Californian and had to train himself to sound like an Aussie when he picked up a guitar: “I'd have to slowly read the words aloud and listen to the accents and inflections, and then try and speak them in tune before singing them. It took a few months before I'd really nailed it, but now if I listen back to old college recordings, I cringe.”

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Lincoln has been something of a stalwart of the Tassie music scene in recent years. In addition to front-manning Fell To Erin, Lincoln has worked his production and studio skills on Red Rival, The Scandals and Enola Fall, all the while teaching music to college kids. If that sounds stressful, it is: “I burned out pretty hard a couple years ago and didn't really want to play music any more” Lincoln told me, “and most of that came down to all the frustrations that go with the business side of things.”

In order to curb those frustrations, Lincoln, a born n bred Tasmanian, is taking more of a Holiday Isle approach to things lately: “I don't really want to 'make it' in the traditional sense anymore, so I can't see any real need to uproot” he confesses. “[Tasmania] is such a beautiful place to draw inspiration from, and frustrating as a small-town mentality can be sometimes, it seems to prevent the kind of rockstar egos that a bigger city might breed.” The isolation of Tassie has other perks too: “I wouldn't have had nearly as many opportunities anywhere else either.”

Those opportunities seem to be picking up for Lincoln and the Insiders lately, having been featured on Triple J’s Unearthed and building some hype on their aforementioned myspace. But in the arch-conservative, attack-dog vicious Australian music industry, this isn’t to say that it’s smooth sailing: “I'm recording [our] album in my lounge room with a bunch of hired and borrowed gear” admits Lincoln. And though he would be more than happy to free up some lounge space and record a high quality studio album, Lincoln isn’t waiting for it to happen: “If a record company offered me a contract, I've got no reason to turn it down, but I'm not exactly expecting any phone calls.”

While the phone remains silent, Lincoln Le Fevre and the Insiders’ debut album is taking shape. When I spoke to Lincoln, he’d been busy recording. “I just finished doing some banjo parts tonight” he said “We've got most of the tracking out of the way now, I've just got a bunch of singing to do, then I'll be able to start mixing.”

For anyone with an interest in trad rock, alt-country or Australian music, the album is going to be worth a squiz: “I think I have ADHD sometimes” says Lincoln. “If music is about those four things I mentioned before, telling a story, smashing some shit, making you want to dance and playing a meeedley-meedley guitar solo, then I want to try and cover as many of those things as I can to make it feel like a complete record. Jesus, I sound like a wanker, don't I?”

“This time round I'm trying not to worry too much about [business] shit; being a solo project the financial burden is only on my shoulders, so I can do what I like, and if I go broke, then fuck it.”

Maintaining the Rage

or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine

Plenty of disgruntled kids first got hooked on Rage Against the Machine with the video clip for "Bulls on Parade". The song was a like big pot of crack-spiked honey to countless testosterone-happy teenage boys, and listening to it now, that’s no surprise. It bludgeons the listener from the outset with a heavy, see-sawing hook which segues into a nasty-as-fuck Zach De La Rocha rap backed by ominous funk. The clip was pretty sick too, combining Cliff Notes style left-wing political messages with MTV-friendly, sleekly produced rawk footage. I was fourteen years old when I first saw that clip, and I was a Rage junkie within weeks.

Thousands of black t-shirt wearing former teenagers of the 90’s would attest to the gratuitous stupor with which they embraced Rage. In what was a lazy, warless, beige era the band was pissed off, eloquent, loud, hard and fast. Like the early punks they deftly straddled left-wing elitism ("Tha power pendulum swings by tha umbilical cord") and meathead rebellion ("Fuck you I won't do what you tell me"). But instead of hocking tired three chord sanctimony like Green Day or The Offspring, they combined, like none before them, those two most archetypal of teenage genres: metal and hip hop. A veritable wet dream for angry, pubescent suburbanites like myself. Uncomfortable questions like why Rage were signed to a major record label didn't really come up.

Rage’s break-up in 2000 devastated fans, but no one was too surprised. Front man Zach's ill-temper is obvious to anyone who spins a Rage album, and by all accounts his anger was democratic: the band copped it almost as bad as his favoured lyrical targets. Famously, Rage had to be forced into an EMI imposed group house arrest to record 1996's Evil Empire, a full five years after their self-titled debut hit. This was no happy union.

But, more than that, Rage just wouldn’t have made sense in the Bush era. That’s not to say that their messages – distrust of government, anti-Americanism, rebellion, et al – weren’t appropriate for those eight vile years of international politics. On the contrary, Rage’s ideas have of late been more than appropriate, much more so than they were in the 90’s. But the point is that Rage pushed left-wing revolution at a time when liberal academics were blowing their loads over the ruined Berlin Wall. They were always fated to be a lone voice of dissent in mainstream music, and could never have survived the sycophantic violence of Bush’s first term or the gush of celebrity driven anti-war posturing a few years later.

So the break-up was long coming. Realistic fans were basically stoked that such a volatile group had managed to release three albums and a covers record. As with any break-up, though, there was the regret – in my case, the regret that I’d never seen them live. Like so many Aussie Rage fans, I missed them at the 1996 Big Day Out, and they never came back to Australia.

For a scary while there, the remaining members of Rage looked for a singer to replace Zach, with a view to maintaining the RATM franchise. But rather than signing up an angry rapper (among others, the names Chuck D and B-Real were thrown around) they went with Chris Cornell, the dastardly mustachioed prima donna who looked all weird in Soundgarden’s clip for “Black Hole Sun”. Audioslave were always pedestrian, dividing Rage fans between loyalists pissed-off at the watering down of the music and desperados clinging to anything produced by three members of their favourite band. After initially falling into the latter camp, I’ve accepted that the former had it right: Audioslave sucked.

And then, out of the blue and after a number of progressively shoddier Audioslave albums, Rage's 2007 "one-off" reunion to play Coachella. That show resulted in a dummy-spit by either Cornell or three-quarters of Rage, depending on who you believe, resulting in the dissolution of the supergroup and the sudden reformation of Rage. Next came the announcement that they were headlining Big Day Out. The concept of Rage back together was strange somehow, but die-hard Aussie fans were pissing their pants with excitement, and I couldn’t help but share it.

As Big Day Out approached, though, I had this weird dread about seeing Rage. Some of it was concrete: for example, accounts had it that Zach congratulated fans at some of the east coast shows for electing Kevin Rudd, a patently ludicrous position for someone so hard-left he’s lived with Mexican revolutionaries EZLN. But most of it was a vague looming apprehension. For the first time I was to see a band who’d meant so much to me as a teenager, but, truth be told, they didn’t mean so much anymore. After so many years, I’d gotten bored, kicked the habit, and moved on.

Rage took the stage at exactly 9:20pm on that stifling Perth evening of 2008’s final Big Day Out, right on schedule. Their sound cut out mid-intro, but they continued playing, oblivious, for a good couple of minutes before the boos of the crowd cut through their amps. It was about the most surprising moment of the show. Rage put on a workhorse effort, Zach leaping maniacally and stalking the stage like a giant-killer, his mic a sling; Tom Morello flawlessly executing ridiculous solos, his guitar screaming, moaning and breaking like Slash put through a DJ scratch set. Thing was, I’d seen and heard all this before.

Rage were just like they were on their live videos, only, something was missing. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just me: the sweaty sea of shirtless, ripped, moshing bogans seemed to be enjoying themselves. But there was a palpable sense of death and nostalgia about the show. This was only enhanced by the fact that Rage played no new songs, nor did they do anything at all surprising or different. This was a bigger problem than it might be for other bands: for so long Rage demanded revolution, so it felt cheap that they’d decided to stick with formula.

Morello’s excuse is that Rage’s music hasn’t dated, and hell, maybe it hasn’t. But I was listening to it a decade ago, so it feels dated to me. Maybe fans should be thankful that we got to see Rage at all, or that they’re not going to release some terrible new album that will destroy their legacy. These are fair points. But nostalgia is a beast from hell. You’ve probably changed, but the music hasn’t.

Zombie Surf

Magnetic Fields - Distortion

(see the published version)

You get the feeling that Stephin Merritt, the singer-songwriter frontman of New York’s The Magnetic Fields, has got artistic sensibilities. Rather than jumping on the grunge/stadium rock bandwagons in the early 90’s, Merritt instead preempted his peers by a good decade by embracing the dreadfully unfashionable sounds of Kraftwerk and Joy Division. In 1999, just when the world was beginning to embrace the mp3 and music journo hacks were predicting the death of the album, Merritt released The Magnetic Fields’ ridiculously overwrought on paper but brilliant in practice triple-CD 69 Love Songs. Merritt’s a pop musician who can’t help but buck conventional pop wisdom, and for those of us who are serious about guitar and lyrics, this has been a good thing for a good while.

Distortion continues The Magnetic Fields’ love-affair with the unfashionable, drawing on 1960’s surf pop and drenching the music in the noun of the title. In case you’re unfamiliar with Merritt’s penchant for concept albums, be aware that Distortion isn’t just a clever name: the music sounds like it’s being seeped through the factory speakers of a 1987 Mazda 121 on a windy day. There’s something old-world or slow-food about this: you don’t need a good sound system to appreciate the intricacies of Distortion, but there’s not much that’s ‘immediate’ about it. In other words, it pays to invest time in the record, because like the music of The Beach Boys (whose influence clearly hangs over Distortion), what sounds merely like fuzzy pop on first listen turns out to be much more.

Which isn’t to say that Distortion is stuck in 1966. Merritt’s lyrics are too funny and there’s too much zombie flick or Grinch-who-stole-Xmas about the album for that. Almost every song on Distortion contains a LOL lyric, with a few ROFLOL thrown in for good measure. To take just one case, in “The Nun’s Litany” Merritt dons the habit and fantasises about alternative careers that our bored heroine might have pursued, each more decadent than the last. If you’ve never pictured a nun as a topless waitress, here’s your chance.

There’s other light moments on Distortion. The punchdrunk lovesick singalong of “Too Drunk to Dream” is the best karaoke song that probably (and tragically) won’t be coming to your local hit studio, and “California Girls” brilliantly reverses the premise of its namesake, with Merritt repeating “I hate California girls” over the promise that said girls will taste the wrath from his battle ax, all sung through a surging wave of guitar.

But it’s the dark, profound, surprising moments on Distortion that make this more than a good album. The aforementioned zombie flick sounds pop up everywhere, best exemplified in that squealing, screaming, distorted second guitar which rarely goes away. And then there’s Merritt’s much lauded turn of lyrical phrase, as adept at penning the ratfink dialogue of an abusive Spaniard (in “Xavier Says”) as he is at producing a stunning final stanza to a song that first appears nothing more than a schoolyard toss (in “The Nun’s Litany”). Just keep the lyric-book nearby.