The Post-Rockist

A Long (belated) Valentine to the Detholz! 

The Detholz! - Mister Electricity
(from Who Are the Detholz!?)

The Detholz! - Behold the Man
(from Cast Out Devils)

Detholz! recordings, Detholz! tour dates, and other assorted Detholz! tidbits available at www.detholz.com. 

The Detholz! have a way of rearranging the realities of the sensory world. At every Detholz! show I have ever been to, there has been a sniff of the weird, or a sense of the infinitely possible. Strangers show up at Detholz! shows and turn out to be long-lost twins. Lovers reunite, and people who do not yet know they are perfect for each other pair off. I have run into ex-boyfriends, ex-peers, ex-coworkers, ex-costars, and ex-floormates at Detholz! shows. And, it seems, I learn another of the endless and eerie commonalities between myself and drummer Andrew Sole, who grew up in metro Detroit, just like me, and went to church a mile away from my house. He babysat for the kid who played Poseidon to my Medusa in a high school play (directed, as an extra note of interest, by the fiancée of one of the editors of this website); his pastor was the father of a former symphony standpartner, who also made a guest apperance as the frontman of an opening band at a show they played in Wheaton, Illinois.

I was an eighteen-year-old with an angry ache nestled in my heart when I saw the Detholz! for the first time. After a crunchy, kitschy set of space rock – songs about following a spurning lover on a train to Mars, a supervillian named Mr. Electricity who is “impossible to touch,” cities overrun by alien armies – the band came back for an encore, wearing bright suits and pale make-up. They set their gear up in silence, played a few tentative chords, and when they all wailed in unison, they spit out cornstarch blood.

They played “Celebrate” and “Hot for Teacher,” rendering every tacky cover with charge. By night’s end I had never been sweatier or more worked up. I had never heard silliness delivered with such urgent earnesty, flushed rock beauty paired so seamlessly with nerdy irony.

My heartbreak was smashed into dust and scattered over the ocean. I was in love.

It was my first year at Beloit College, and during my four years there, the Detholz! became an institution, playing once a semester in the smelly, roady basement of the C-Haus. Their shows were like no other shows. They played to shirtless, screaming crowds for hours, encore after encore, giving us their best songs two or three times. The walls of the bar would sweat brown streaks of beer, tobacco, and grime. Afterward they would come to our parties and dance on our tables. This was rock revivalism at its best, with all of the danger, all of the spirit, all of the flesh.

The Detholz!, of course, have regularly scheduled lives away from this dirty booze pit on the stateline. They live together in Chicago, have other jobs, play music with other bands (notably, Baby Teeth and Bobby Conn), and maybe – no one really likes admitting this, but we’re jealous lovers  – maybe have dedicated fans that aren’t Beloit College students.

Formed in 1996 at Wheaton College – the notoriously fundamentalist alma mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, where dancing was banned until 2003 – the band initially explored their frustrations with stagy irreverence, performing in space suits and smashing television sets with pickaxes. Return engagements at Wheaton resulted in demonstrations, prayer circles, and altercations between fans and detractors.

“We nurtured images of the ‘quintessential Detholz! fan,’” says lead singer Jim Cooper, “who is a socially maladjusted male between the ages of 15 and 30, in a profession related to science or math, probably hopelessly addicted to porn, terrified of women, snorty, constantly apologizing, etcetera.”

In 2002, Detholz! debuted their first full-length, Who are the Detholz!?, a sort of campy musical Metropolis. Though members of the band have expressed reluctance at ever performing or even hearing most of the songs on that album ever again, it is nonetheless meticulously crafted, full of tabernacle harmonies, impeccable electronics, electrifying arches of melody and rhythms so sharp they could snap your neck. This was the album I took home with me after my first life-altering Detholz! experience, and it spent long summers spinning in my car stereo, and lonely winters waiting with me for the thaw of the earth and the blistering homecoming of my heart’s most resilient suitors.

Seasons turned and the band returned, time and time again, to the C-Haus. I kept listening to Who Are the Detholz!?, but it was becoming evident that the album was aging, and that these rock-and-roll missionaries were not themselves getting any younger. Their new songs were full of disco experimentalism, psycho-curious explorations. Jim’s televangelistic monologues were getting darker and closer to the quick. And as the annual Halloween Jukebox of the Dead fete became increasingly elaborate – evolving to include covers of “We Built This City” and the unfortunate Cher-surrection single “Believe” alongside old favorites “Like a Virgin” and “Dancing on the Ceiling” –  their sets of original music became tentative. Requests for “Last Train to Mars” were not always honored, to widespread disappointment. Songs were played that we would never hear again. Whispers persisted that a new album was coming out “soon,” but we could never get a straight answer as to when.

Their shows remained transcendent. We kept taking our shirts off.

But we started to ask ourselves:

What is going on? Were these guys Christians or what? Were there kernels of sincerity in their preacherly tirades? Was a song like “I.M.A. Believer” presented to us only in parody? Wheaton College was no big secret, and of course we would have accepted the Detholz! regardless of agenda or persuasion. Still, it nagged, and it nagged more as the band seemed to be scampering off in ambiguous directions.

And then, like a strike of lightning from the sky, the good people at RightRightRight Films produced and released Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a feature-length documentary about Christian rock and including extensive interviews with members of Detholz!, addressing at once the question that many of us had formulated on our own over the course of a long courtship with this band, and forging a valley of clarity. This was a band that was Going Through a Transition. They were Figuring It All Out.

(Continued)

Stephin Merritt - Ukulele Me!
(from Showtunes)

Jens Lekman - Julie (RMX)
(from Oh You’re So Silent Jens)

Beirut - The Bunker
(from Gulag Orkestar)

Jolie Holland - Darlin’ Ukulele
(from Escondida)

“We met and spoke… at the ukulele workshop that summer. … We had quickly discovered our common love of the instrument,” Miles recalled, “and discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held - traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords - single, timeless events apprehended all at once instead of serially. Notes of a linear melody, up and down a staff, being a record of pitch versus time, to play a melody is to introduce the element of time, and hence of mortality. Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up.”

“Never thought of it like that,” said Chick, “all I know is, is it sure sounds better than when we sing a cappella.”

-Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“The ukulele is a noble little instrument… anyone serious about music will eventually come to play one.”

-Bob Brozman

“When I hear the sound of that little brown thing humming, I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”

-Stephin Merritt

At the Jonathan Richman show at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC

–Posted by Scotter

Louis Armstrong - Jeepers Creepers
(from The Majestic Years)

Al Bowlly - It’s Great To Be In Love
(from The Al Bowlly Story) 

Though I’m generally not one for beaches and sunsets and the great outdoors and all that, it is a realm lush with metaphorical possibilities for describing that woozy internal feeling we call love.  So, on days like today when it’s treacherously cold outside, it’s nice to have a warm mix of cheeky love songs to bring us into the month of May. (Temptations? “My Girl”? What? No, didn’t work? Nevermind…)  Or better yet, as Louis Armstrong puts it, “I don’t care how the weatherman points when the weatherman points to gloomy, it’s got to be sunny to me when your eyes look into mine.”  Egads!  I can hear a collective groan go out across the internet music community - those lyrics are so schmaltzy, and what could possibly be more schmaltzy than Louis Armstrong love songs on Valentine’s Day?  Well for starters, Al Bowlly, pre-war Great Britain’s answer to Bing Crosby, whose voice simply drips with sap and saccharine to the modern listeners’ ears, which have unfortunately become acclimated to love songs sung with brazen earnestness or permeated with pheromones.  But to our ears, sweetness is sincerity, and we don’t mind having our soft spots quiver like jam preserves.

When the horns start to send the snare drum scuttling on “It’s Great To Be In Love,” it’s as if lazy Cupid lobbed his arrow into your posterior, jolting you out of your peaceable, gray existence to send you traipsing through the loony technicolor realization that “the skies are always sunny and life is sweet as honey” because “it’s great to be in love.”  How simple is that.  Love, what a crazy thing.  It leaves you knock-kneed, starry-eyed, and out of touch with reality.  Bowlly is so unbelievably cheery in his adulation of love that he could practically reach his hand into a nearby snow mound and pull out a fistful of brightly colored gerber daisies, and when the violin comes soaring in I can almost imagine a nestful of blue Robin’s eggs hatching, with the young chicks whistling in harmony, perched on their icy branch.  Of course, that’s just the song getting away with me.  How silly of me.  But at the very least, I feel a Chico Marx impression is in order, adjusting my necktie to sound of the clarinets and lollygagging about after a fine, loveable lass. And, believe me, this fantasy is a much more preferable vision compared to unplowed, sleet-covered streets outside my window at this moment.

-Posted by Todd

Jon Brion - I Believe She’s Lying
(from Meaningless)

Jon Brion’s weekly live show at the shockingly small restaurant (it’s a stretch to call it a club) Largo in Los Angeles is kind of legendary.  It’s just him, a wide array of instruments, a looping system, and a stage.  You can book a reservation months in advance to sit and have dinner while he plays, or you could stand outside for an hour or two hoping to get a standing-room spot where servers carrying trays of food will ask you to crowd closer to the bar.  Brion plays original tunes and brilliantly reimagined covers, which he often performs spontaneously from audience requests. The night I was fortunate enough to attend, he played “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” with one hand chording on an upright piano and the other controlling a vocoder, creating a robotic rendition of the song that had way more soul than any song with the word “robotic” in the description should ever reasonably have. He also killed two audience request birds with one stone by flawlessly transferring Bowie’s “Heroes” to the basstwang style of Johnny Cash. A few minutes later, he combined the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” with Prince’s “Kiss” in such an imaginative and effective way that I burst out laughing.

The covers stole the show. I walked out of the club proclaiming to my friends that Brion was a genius. I still believe that, but I now have even more proof: his lone solo album, Meaningless (2001).  There’s nothing gimmicky about the album: it’s just eleven pop songs.  It’s hard to really convince someone that an album is brilliant without their ever hearing it, but damnit, I’m gonna try.

Meaningless starts, appropriately enough, with a song called “Gotta Start Somewhere.”  “I might not have anything to offer you,” Brion sings.  “I might not have anything to say that’s new / But you’ve gotta start somewhere.”  The song starts the album perfectly, and leads into the following track, the standout “I Believe She’s Lying,” with its absurdly fantastic sped-up drum beat pushing the tempo but never losing the focus on the wonderful melodies that are all over this album.  The set calms down but never loses momentum in the second half, ending with a slowed, piano-based seven-and-a-half minute cover of Cheap Trick’s “Voices,” where Brion modifies the already superb harmonies of the original to emphasize the creepiness of the lyrics.  You know how you can hear any Beatles song, like, once or twice, and then you’ll know the melody for the rest of your life?  How every note they sing or play sounds in its right place?  This album is like that.

Now, bear with me for a minute: the title track of the album is about being constantly reminded of your ex by various stupid, meaningless things you saw together.  But naming the album Meaningless seems to imply either an inferiority complex or a pessimistic analysis of the state of the art.  Are these songs meaningless?  Is pop music?  Does it matter that Brion might not have anything to say that’s new?  A good pop song is hard to find these days, especially compared to the heroes of the ‘60s and ‘70s pop/rock heyday by which Brion is clearly inspired.  But he’s created a, dare I say it, meaningful set of tunes worthy to be placed among the great albums of that Golden Age.

-Posted by Andrew

Essex Green - Sin City
(from Cannibal Sea)

This one comes from the “ask and thou shalt receive” bin.  A reader duly noted that the Essex Green’s third album, Cannibal Sea, made an appearance on one of our writer’s “Top Ten of 2006″ lists and inquired whether we would be paying any attention to today’s scheduled woxy.com lounge act session.  Well, as it turns out, the lounge act was canceled, and my attendance at their live show this evening in Newport, Kentucky has been nixed as well due to waning health. Nevertheless, a plug is in order, and a plug you shall receive.

Although “Sin City,” with its gentle waves of acoustic strumming, tambourine, and glinting keyboard, is thematically a story of the band’s lament over guitarist/singer Chris Ziter’s move to “O-hi-o” (sung just like that), Cincinnati residents can pick up on a more discreet subject. While singer Sasha Bell never comes right out and says so, the sing-songy references to tugboats, green Kentucky hills, and the Queen City’s primary NFL rival town, the geographical heart of this balladeering pop song is hard to miss.  And if you missed Essex Green in Sin City tonight, you can take a tug or take a train to see them in Pittsburgh tomorrow.

-Posted by Todd