Meat: The Cleavers
When Wheels Were Square
By Jon Whiten
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Over the past half-year, as I've thrown myself into being the de facto "music editor" here, I've been more than pleasantly surprised at how alive and interesting the independent music scene all over the state really is. Jersey Beat's Jim Testa recently noted, in Tris McCall's 2006 Critic's Poll, that the "Most Welcome Surprise" for him last year was "the resurgence of New Brunswick's underground music scene." Judging by the songs and bands I've heard coming out of the Hub City and surrounding areas, I'm inclined to agree with him. And what's more, this isn't your older cousin's New Brunswick scene -- all variations on the theme of Lifetime -- the range of bands and musical styles coming out of the central Jersey area is impressively vast.
Meat: The Cleavers is a part of that resurgence, if by nothing other than the virtue of geography. The band is essentially the solo project of New Brunswick's Chris Caccavale. His is a common story -- he had a bunch of songs, so he went ahead and recorded them, turning the songs into two releases (The Emmit Brown EP and Evacuate the Village). Now Caccavale's got a full-length (six songs, about 41 minutes) that's about to be released, When Wheels Were Square.
When I first threw the record on -- or in, as it were -- three words came to mind: Flying Saucer Attack. But I promised I wouldn't play the name game on this review, so we'll just leave it at that and move on to (hopefully) more substantive issues.
"The Ballad Of" throws on a drum machine, but this is a guitar album, mostly electric, with a few touches of acoustic. There could also be a keyboard in the mix, or it could just be a heavily processed guitar, given the album's obsession with texture, the latter would make more sense. The aforementioned texture is a major component of the record -- I suggest headphones -- as three of the six songs are instrumental (the tracklist sandwiches the three songs with vocals in between the three instrumentals). Caccavale tracked almost everything himself, with an assist from Zelda Pinwheel's James Dellatacoma on a few songs.
While I love me some abstract noise and ambient music, I definitely have to be in the right kind of mood, and I'll always prefer to have songs and voices in the mix, no matter how much head-tripping the rest of the tracks are doing. I probably could have gone for fewer instrumental tracks, or for a fuller instrumentation on them ("People Receding on the Plain," in particular, had me drumming my theoretical beats on my desk and composing grand symphonic crescendos, a la Godspeed! You Black Emperor, in my head).
So, of course, my two favorite tracks on the album are both ones with vocals. "Lime and Ice" takes a simple acoustic guitar meditation, loads on the reverb, adds a little ambient noise in the background, and throws on Caccavale's plaintive vocals, also echo-ed to the max. The overall mood is perfectly wintry and comfortable. "Freddie's Song," from what I can tell a sad meditation on loss, throws a perfectly mournful guitar slide over his hushed whisper.
In the album's instrumental opener, "Preface," the two main guitar lines swirl you into a hypnotic state, only to pull out of rhythmic synch just enough to make you stutter, before settling back into the groove. After a slow, slow build of about eight minutes, things start to fall apart, sounds of dying cats seem to be coming through a guitar amp, and a general chaos starts to rise out of the trance-like din, before the song descends into full-on noise and fades out.
At first, I thought that another possible way to deal with When Wheels Were Square's split personality -- especially to satiate someone who may have less of a tolerance for ambient instrumental medleys -- might have been to create an instrumental "side" and a "traditional" "side" (although I realize that even the language of "sides" when it comes to albums is close to obsolete).
But after giving this a few days' and a few listens' thought -- I think the back-and-forth might just work, as long as you pick the right context to throw this record on, that is. The flow between instrumental and vocal-ed song was clearly well-planned, just as the flow between minor noise freakout and near silence inside of any particular song was also well-planned.
When Wheels Were Square's strength is that it could be a lot of things:
a come-down album, a morning-coffee album, a background album to lasso
some concentration. Most of all, though, it's an album that deserves
your attention.
When Wheels Were Square will be released February 27, and should be available at Vintage Vinyl, CD Freedom, and Princeton Record Exchange, as well as via the internets.
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Meat: The Cleavers
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