Member:Baribrotzer
Date:9/26/2003
I like this band a lot, but more for what they sometimes do and could become than for everything they actually do now. Much of their sound and material reminds me of some obscure Jersey-surburban bands circa 1975-1980, who had started out as prog bands just as that music was dying, and who tried to adapt to the new wave thing. They were WAY better musicians and WAY more sophisticated listeners and writers than most of the punk bands they shared bills with. (Although some of the "real" punk or new-wave bands had clearly listened to and maybe once tried to play prog - Devo, Blondie, Oingo Boingo, and the Buzzcocks, for example.)
However, to get gigs, those bands had to play superficially punk-like short verse-chorus AABA songs in 4/4, built in straightforward four- or eight-bar phrases. So they spiced them up with really tricky arrangements and (sometimes) elaborate chord changes, wrote sarcastic wise-ass lyrics, played with great energy, jumped around a lot, wore the right red, black, and white clothes, got strange haircuts, and hoped all that would get them by. It usually didn't: the average punter will accept a well-packaged fraud to some degree, but also has a fairly good sense of when someone is talking down to him.
More often than not, Bubblemath recreate that sound with eerie accuracy, and it has a similar irritating quality. Imagine Gentle Giant and Steely Dan gone punk - little pop tunes with jazzy vamps and big piled-up chords in elaborately hocketed arrangements, lyrics full of sick adolescent smarty-pants humor with brainy scientific references and cheap shots at sitting ducks, and seven minutes worth of musical ideas crammed into three. It makes one want to shout, "Yes, I know how intelligent you are. I know, I know! Would you please stop hitting me over the head with it?"
At their best, though, they transcend that. The over-busy music becomes an intense quadruple shot of espresso, a wild roller-coaster of a Manhattan cab ride that shakes you about, spins you upside down, nearly runs you into a wall, then deposits you intact at the final bar. The cluttered arrangements and dense production add to the intensity, rather than coming across as a mess. And those polished, clever lyrics full of elaborate word games, a style that can easily become an impersonal show of intellectual superiority with any kind of feeling hidden behind a wall of wit, go beyond that into something else: In the hands of Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, or Lorenz Hart, that tricky approach CAN depict confused, conflicted ambivalence very well; and at his best, Kai manages to do a similar good job of that, to get the same sense of "If I'm so smart, why am I such a mess?"
This sort of artistic breakthrough seems to happen most often when they get away from verse-chorus structures - the extra work and care it takes to let the music find its own form seems to inspire the band. When they build a tune without letting it fall into a preset pattern, they take more musical risks, become unpredictable, more progressive*, and far more interesting. The music goes to places other than just a fancied-up ride around the block on songs like "Miscreant Citizen", "Be Together" or "Forever Endeavor", and the lyrics also hit that higher level. And I find it significant that the first two of those tunes lead off Such Fine Particles of the Universe, that the band have released all three as MP3s, and that the new tunes they played at Progday seem to continue in that vein (having heard them only once, though, I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case). It suggests that Bubblemath consider those their best tunes, want people to hear them first and judge the band in terms of them, and intend to keep going in that musical direction. Though this recording contains a fair proportion of not-so-strong material, which has excited immediate floccinaucinihilipilification by some, I think it also contains some excellent songs and the band shows a ton of potential. If they live up to it, their next recording should hit the bulls-eye.
- JH
*Apparently Bubblemath have little or no influence from traditional prog bands - their music comes from pop, punk rock, and New Wave, progressed with both Broadway elements and jazz composers’ extensions of the showtune vocabulary. So you could compare them to an updated version of Queen, only with the buttrawk replaced by punk, with more jazz, and with a couple of decent but unspectacular vocalists instead of Freddie’s over-the-top operatic virtuosity.
Source: http://www.progressiveears.com/asp/reviews.asp?albumID=2386&bhcp=1