Last week’s careening trip through country music and its various hybrids drew me back to Califone, a sort of ambient roots rock band that has as much experimental noise in their DNA as country. Califone, the brainchild of Tim Rutili, plays, let’s say, corroded folk music. Their albums are full of studio enhancements that make them sound fresh, even though they also sound like they’ve spent the last fifty years in a rusted oil drum. If Tom Waits ever makes another album, I hope he’ll give Califone a call.
Before Califone the same (or very similar) personnel were Red Red Meat. As so many alternative bands did in the early 1990s, Red Red Meat began their life as a heavy rock band. They weren’t grunge, but they weren’t exactly not grunge. Hell, they even toured with The Smashing Pumpkins.
Their debut Red Red Meat is the most traditionally rocking album of the band’s career. It has more Screaming Trees in it than Folkways Records, but you can tell what’s coming. “Molly’s on the Rag” is a resonator slide workout, and “Flossy” is a dynamic, evolving groover. Rutili’s hushed vocals and cryptic lyrics have more in common with the gnomic post rock singers of Slint and Talk Talk than the chest-thumping soul bearers from Seattle
Red Red Meat’s second album, Jimmywine Majestic, found the band closing in on their signature sound. The distorted electric guitars were mostly absent, replaced by distorted acoustics. On Jimmywine, the band treated the studio as an instrument. You hear them experimenting with mic placement and auxiliary percussion.
In a contemporaneous review, The Washington Post compared them to the Stones at their most dissolute. I couldn’t put it better myself. If, instead of releasing Exile on Main Street, the Stones continued recording at Villa Nellcôte (and slamming smack), they might have come up with Jimmywine Majestic.
On Jimmywine, Red Red Meat seemed freed from the need to rock. Around this time, their fellow Chicago natives Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day were making energizing, elliptical music without the au courant of massive choruses and walls of guitars. In the years after grunge blew out everyone’s eardrums, the savvier bands were turning down their amps, or forgoing electric guitars all together. After the overloaded distortion of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, a band could either get quieter or weirder. Red Red Meat did both.
Everything came together for the band on their third album. Bunny Gets Paid isn’t appreciably different sounding than Jimmywine Majestic, but it’s roundly better. The songs are fuller and the studio experiments are entirely successful.
Bunny Gets Paid sounds like electric and acoustic Neil Young albums played at the same time with Neil Young scooped out. There’s a lot of empty space in it for listeners to fill with their own anxiety. The acoustic and electric instrumentation feels like a clash of pastoral and industrial, evoking oil slicks on lakes and contaminated soil. If Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker didn’t already have the perfect soundtrack, Bunny Gets Paid would’ve made an acceptable substitute.
“Chain, Chain, Chain” joins Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” as another great rock song about chains. Some subjects are inherently rock & roll – cars, girls, doing so many drugs your mind expands, doing so many drugs your mind shuts down, and, apparently, chains.
“Rosewood, Wac, Voltz + Glitter” proves that Red Red Meat could’ve been a great American shoegaze band if they wanted. Lyrics occasionally punch through the squall of “Idiot Son” – “grey cloud…crimson…Jesus only…” – but the song’s real meaning lies in the slide guitar darting above a distorted, processed din. Although the band has some sonic similarities with the troubadours of old, they’re less interested in the words than the sounds. On “Taxidermy Blues in Reverse,” the Meat sound like Led Zeppelin covered in fur. This is a band that does loud well.
But they can also do quiet. The opener “Carpet of Horses” has old timey guitar laid atop a drone loop – old meets new. “Variations on Nadia’s Theme” sounds so much like And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out-era Yo La Tengo that I wonder if the indie stalwarts copped that move from the RRM. “Buttered”’s heavy-handed strums sounds straight up like Leadbelly.
If I’ve one gripe with the album – and it’s a matter of taste rather than actual criticism – it’s that I wish they played more rockers. As is, Bunny Gets Paid is about 50/50 loud to quiet. I like my albums a little more potent: two thirds to one third. But that’s also my same complaint with Radiohead. Those guys are just so sad they can’t play their instruments any faster.
Instead of trying to refine their sound – and maybe expand their audience – Red Red Meat continued down their own idiosyncratic path on their fourth album There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight. If Bunny Gets Paid was their London Calling, There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight is their Standanista. Instead of trying to write singles, they delved deeper into abstraction, while expanding their sound, adding samplers, loops, and digital processing to their rootsy gumbo. The album is not really the culmination of the band, so much as it is a bridge to what would become Califone. It may be their most interesting album, but it’s my least favorite of theirs.
The 1990’s were full of musicians who wanted to season the music of the past with the technology of the day. Beck and Moby chopped up blues and spliced it with hip-hop beats, Grandaddy added Casio keyboards to his folk songs, and DJ Shadow remixed his entire record collection together. Red Red Meat took old blues, folk, and country, and remade it in a world with loops, subwoofer, and effects pedals. Often, the path to innovation begins with a long look backwards. “There’s aways tomorrow for dreams to come true,” Rutilli sings on Bunny Gets Paid‘s closer. His dreams, naturally, involved covering an old Christmas song.
