Published on Mar 25, 2005
A great album is like a great painting, a great wine, a great
movie or a great kiss. It takes your breath away, tickles your
senses, steals time and leaves you changed — maybe sad, maybe
smiling, anything but indifferent.
Nothing Is Cohesive is a great album.
It is also one of the most aptly titled discs to cross my desk
in many a moon. If you’re looking for 12 variations on the same
basic theme, go buy a Nickelback album or something. This is art
here, folks — diverse, challenging, reckless, brilliant.
So after that build-up, what does Transcendence — Ed Hale
(vocals, guitars, piano, keys), Fernando Perdomo (guitars, drums,
vocals, sitar, keys), Roger Houdaille (bass, vocals, guitar), Jon
Rose (piano, keys, vocals), Bill Sommer & Ben Belin (drums) —
actually sound like? Imagine Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Frank
Zappa, Roger Waters, Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Dan Wilson (Semisonic)
and Bono partying all night and then cutting an album with Beatles
producer George Martin manning the boards, and you might be in the
neighborhood. It’s an erratic, ecstatic kaleidoscope of tones,
textures, voices and attitudes that takes all the right lessons
from ’70s rock and employs them with imagination and flair, and it
adds up to utter shambling magnificence.
We open with a brief, mood-setting snippet of ambient
electronics before the band cranks up the engine and dives into the
postmodern space-rock of “Somebody Kill The DJ,” full of dreamy
vocals, dirty riffs and cheeky electronic accents. Its sequel “I
Wanna Know Ya” is an early highlight that gives you 2:30 of raunchy
Glimmer Twins swagger before flying off the hinges at the solo in
favor of a raucous outro/breakdown.
Next up is Mr. & Mrs. McCartney’s “Tomorrow” … and
“Tomorrow”… and “Tomorrow.” First you get a silly 53-second sound
bite of the chorus sung as if it was a ’40s Broadway ballad. Then
you get a full-out version that feels like the steaming wreckage of
a head-on collision between Supertramp and Queen, the electric
piano propelling the bouncy melody along under swelling,
multi-tracked choruses… at least until two minutes in, when the
tempo shifts completely and you get a third, ecstatic, “Hey
Jude”-like vision of the song…!
Stay with me now, I haven’t even gotten to the best stuff
yet.
“Caetano” starts out like a U2 ballad, with some of Hale’s most
Bono-esque, laconically melodramatic vocals. Then as it swells and
builds with layers of bright guitars and “la-la” background vocals
until you recognize the song as the devastatingly accurate parody
of an egomaniacal frontman’s number one fan: “The people can’t wait
to be near you / Fall to their knees when they hear your voice /
Man you’re a God / The power to heal from just your singing.”
Finishing up the first half of the disc, “Come On” sounds like
1974-ish David Bowie on a caffeine bender, guitars squealing in
glorious pain toward the end as the frenetic beat finally collapses
in on itself.
Kicking off the second half of this disc, the sweet, wistful
ballad “All This Is Beginning To Feel Like An Ending” builds from
just piano and voice to a crescendoing guitar-drum duet that feels
borrowed from
Who’s Next. Simply gorgeous rock and roll, and it’s followed
by one of the most dynamic pieces here. “Revolution In Me” comes
off like Bono singing Hendrix, soaring vocals over psychedelic
chords, with a sunny little pop bridge stuck in the middle and a
Wilco-style freakout/train wreck at the finish.
“Cleopatra Ecstacy” brings back the Bowie vibe before segueing
into the unnamed track 11, a sound-collage experiment that features
those time-honored standards, the truck-backing-up noise, swirling
guitar feedback and the mysterious woman speaking French. (I half
expected the finish to be her saying “yankee hotel foxtrot” in a
Parisian accent…) “Softening,” which didn’t make much of a
mark with me the first couple of listens to this album, may
actually sum it up best — an introspective,
Abbey Road-ish piano ballad that gradually piles on fresh
accents and elements and twists until it builds into a veering,
overwrought bridge that segues into an ecstatic outro that finally
breaks down completely. Four minutes, four movements…!
And then there’s “Bored,” easily the least boring song I’ve
heard in 2005.
Opening with a quiet chorus of vaguely Eastern-sounding chords,
the band suddenly hits the gas 30 seconds in and has a hyperactive
musical epiphany that sounds like Dick Dale and Ravi Shankar
sharing a fatty — before segueing back to the opening chords and
building them again into a completely different jam. You could call
it prog, but how many prog bands write songs whose lyrics open —
three minutes into the song — with “I’m so fucking bored / I just
can’t believe I’m stuck in this hell that I live in / I’m such a
fucking whore / Prostituting my integrity to secure this false
celebrity.” (The lyric sounds, in fact, like an inversion of
“Caetano,” taking the singer’s perspective instead of the fan’s.)
And then the song builds some more, and changes some more, and
revisits and embellishes previous themes, and feels at the end of
its seven minutes like one of those magical rooms that is much
bigger on the inside than the outside.
After that epic musical moment, the rest is denouement, and
rightly so. “If Your Baby Could” is a disarmingly pretty acoustic
love song, and the title track closes things out with an
alternately jittery and spacey dueling-electric-pianos
instrumental.
Indeed,
Nothing Is Cohesive, but that’s what makes it special. It’s
like an episode of
Lost, where you think you finally know something, and then
they find another way to turn your expectations inside out. It’s
musical anarchy, beautiful chaos. It’s art. It’s Transcendence. Do
not miss it.