Consider last week’s column as the introduction to this one.
Here are a handful of rock and punk albums that make good use of keyboards and synthesizers.
THE WHO’S WHO’S NEXT: We can’t really do a list like this without acknowledging the Who’s Who’s Next. In an era when The Band, The Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen’s E Streeters were using piano and organs to harken back to an earlier era of rock and roll, Pete Townshend and the Who were looking to the future. Townshend programmed a Lowry organ on “Baba O’Riley” (named so to check Townshend’s guru Meher Baba and synth-head composer Terry Riley) to lock in the tempo of the song and allow drummer Keith Moon to thrash about. On “Going Mobile,” he used a VCS3 to broaden the bridge and add squirrelly sound effects to the outro. And, most dramatically, he used a wall-sized ARP 2500 as, essentially, another rhythm guitar on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Although most listeners probably consider synthesizers a lead instrument, the stalwart rhythm guitarist used it almost exclusively as a rhythmic one.
SIX FINGER SATELLITE’S SEVERE EXPOSURE: Six Finger Satellite adapted Gang of Four to the pigfuck era. On Severe Exposure, their second album, the noisy dance rock band made their catchiest batch of songs. Although screechy guitars, aggressive drums, and incessant bass dominate the proceedings, the synthesizer undergirds everything, adding sheets of noise to “Pulling a Train,” creeping away on the intro to “Cock Fight,” and zipping around “Rabies (Baby’s Got The).” Oh, and it also gets the hook of the band’s most played song, “Parlour Games.”
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND’S WHITE HEAT/WHITE LIGHT: While John Cale’s native instrument was the viola, the Velvets learned early on that they didn’t need viola on all their songs, so Cage spent most of his time in the band switching between bass guitar and, importantly here, a Vox combo organ augmented with a distortion pedal. The instrument gets its best showcase on the 17-minute noise improvisation “Sister Ray,” in which Cale weaves his own squalling organ lines between Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison’s rhythm guitars. On “White Heat/White Light,” Reed hammers on an upright piano like Chuck Berry player Johnnie Johnson. Although I’ve admitted to finding the sound of an acoustic piano boring, I have a soft spot when it’s treated like a hacking rhythm guitar.
BRAINIAC’S HISSING PRIGS IN A STATIC COUTURE: Undone by the tragic death of its cracked Prince front man Tim Taylor, Brainiac were one of the most creative bands of the 1990s, and nowhere is that more apparent than in its synthesizer playing. On “Pussyfootin’” Taylor’s scritchy-scratch synth work resembles a turntablist. On “Vincent Come on Down,” it grabs the hook of the song by following the guitar chords. On “Nothing Ever Changes,” it uses bee-boops to add movement to a vamp. Best of all, “On Cracked Machine,” it plays a messy atonal counterpoint to the lead guitar, before closing the songs as a burbling mess. A cracked machine indeed.
PREOCCUPATIONS’ PREOCCUPATIONS: We’ve discussed these Canadian post-punks before, but I want to throw them on this list for how well they allow guitars and synthesizers to coexist. Sometimes one takes the lead while the other plays textures and sometimes they switch…and sometimes the bass takes the lead and they both play textures. I like how an angelic string pad enters at 1:30 on “Zodiac” to shift the song’s tone without changing a chord, how a horn-type lead becomes the hook of “Monotony,” how “Memory” decays into five minutes of sonic clouds to replicate the impermanence of the song’s subject, and how the chewy Moog lines make “Fever” sound more majestic than its song’s subject matter.
LES SAVY FAV’S EMOR: ROME UPSIDE DOWN: Having found success off 1999’s The Cat and the Cobra, the RISD-born punk band suddenly lost their second guitarist. Instead of replacing him, they fattened up their next release, EMOR, with synthesizer bleeps and bloops. This should’ve positioned them perfectly to take over the electroclash decade, but instead of developing their punk-with-synths sound, they added another guitarist. Les Savy Fav still had another classic record in them, Let’s Stay Friends, but it would’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if they got to the LCD Soundsystem sound first.
STEPHEN MALKMUS’S FACE THE TRUTH: After threatening the world with an indie rock jam band on Pig Lib, Stephen Malkmus fell in love with synthesizers and smeared them all over 2005’s mostly solo Face the Truth. On opener “Pencil Rot,” synths sound like guitars and guitars sound like synths – check out their dueling leads in the intro. During the song’s bridge, four synths squiggle and the guitars largely vanish. As a lead-first guitar player, Malkmus is a natural at writing synth lines (see: “Baby, C’mon”), though for the rest of the album they are mostly textural instead of load-bearing. On 2020’s Groove Denied, he would truly sideline the guitar for an almost entirely electronic album, but this album best show how guitar and synths can play nicely together.
Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD’S POLYGONDWANALAND: When King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard play at their trashiest, they typically eschew synthesizers all together (conversely, when they’re at their danciest, they typically do away with their guitars). But, at their proggiest, like on Polygondwanaland, synths and guitars coexist peacefully. In my favorite synth moment on the record, a fat arpeggio makes a clearing 7:30 into the epic “Crumpling Castle,” which the band soon fills with drums, wailing harmonica, and guitars, before the band transitions into its doomiest self and closes the song. So cool. On “Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet,” the Gizz pull the same trick, but fill the opening with more synthesizers instead. Also cool.
EMPEROR’S IN THE NIGHTSIDE ECLIPSE: The conservative black metal scene brought keyboards to their music faster than (the also conservative, musically speaking) hardcore scene. Emperor’s 1994 debut works as a Norwegian black metal album in the mold of Bathory of Celtic Frost, but their post production addition of organ and pad sounds adds an otherworldly quality to the lo-fi tremolo-picked squall. As we’ve learned with more recent acts like Oranssi Pazuzu and Blood Incantation, keyboards add another dimension to metal bands, allowing moments of peace or anxious tension before another pummeling barrage of guitars.
PERE UBU’s DUB HOUSING: Allen Ravenstine may be my favorite synth player, and his instrument didn’t even have a keyboard. Throughout Pere Ubu‘s second album, Ravenstiene plays rinky-dink lead lines, uses white noise as a rhythmic device, climbs up a scale alongside the guitar to bring “Navvy” over the top, makes bird noises in the background of “On the Surface,” makes a slippery mess of “Drinking Wine Spodyody,” is the rhythm track for “Blow Daddy-O,” makes “Codex” sound so desolating, and plays friendly with woozy slide guitar, saxophone, bass, piano, and David Thomas’s bizarre yawp throughout. Ravenstine’s playing is the definition of tasteful, for a band that would be so easy to over-season.
