Superbody Youth Music, Bad Jazz Daymare
Superbody
Youth Music
(Good Sadie)
Satirist Tom Lehrer cheekily dismissed rock music as “children’s records” on his live album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, unaware in 1959 of the serious and infantile polar-opposite extremes popular music would take in future decades.
The second album from Superbody (from Chattanooga via Dalton, Ga.) is titled Youth Music, but it’s not exactly a children’s record. In an interview with Impose magazine, lead singer Robert Gregg McCurry explained that he and multi-instrumentalist Caleb Jackson Dills wanted to capture “the childlike feeling of obsession with music, bands and ‘crushes’ of any kind.”
Before little humans become jaded adults with cluttered, stressed minds, they’re wide-eyed youngsters who often lack the self-consciousness to hide their excitement; before critical judgment becomes more nuanced and fine-tuned, things are often simply in the “love it” or “hate it” categories, and everything could be an obsession.
Within seconds of hearing Superbody, it’s obvious that new wave pop music from the ‘80s bears a profound influence, but the members weren’t even alive in the ‘80s. What is their connection? Did it come from a fascination with something seemingly exotic, yet ridiculous and perhaps incomprehensible, including fashion senses that included Miami Vice pastel colors and feathered hair?
Their own obsession is translated into this feeling of wonder; innocence, perhaps, but not ignorance. You see, Superbody understands what makes this music tick.
With homemade digital recordings, Superbody has a production style that doesn’t mask artificiality but instead flaunts it. Music tropes from the ‘80s are worn proudly like jewelry; McCurry and Dills stick with the formulas so that more attention is placed on the details.
One notable feature is McCurry’s distinctive singing style, mixing a Southern accent, throaty low notes and hammy-yet-endearing affectations, bringing to mind a mix of Falco and John Maus. “Real Luv,” with its vocoder-style robotic vocals, actually is more reminiscent of Daft Punk’s ‘80s appropriations rather than ‘80s music itself.
Some moments on Youth Music seem to be inspired by Prince, such as the cathartic, wailing intro to “Dishes” on electric guitar or the synth chord thrusts and LinnDrum beats of “City Boy Blues.”
But with all its references, most importantly, Youth Music consistently delivers the pop hooks that make it an irresistible joy—sure, it’s about secondhand memories of the past, but it’s also about escapism and temporarily forgetting the present.
Bad Jazz
Daymare
(Eh?)
A photo included with the new album Daymare from the San Francisco-centered trio Bad Jazz, on the Public Eyesore imprint Eh?, shows a microphone pointed at a plate of raw fish steaks bearing what look like puncture wounds, undoubtedly inflicted in order to create uncomfortable sounds.
Over a single improvised 40-minute track, Daymare isn’t just about seafood abuse—it covers strange territory with a bevy of unconventional instruments, including those invented by non-traditionalists Ben Salomon and Bryan Day, plus one recognizable piano played by Tania Chen, who also employs electronics and toys.
It’s an album best heard on headphones to soak up every playful-yet-disquieting detail, and its mood is largely a somber one, with moments of unexpected mischief. With a consciousness of space and time, the three players intersect respectfully, perhaps like animals sniffing at each other, without a competitive need to outshine each other. It’s provocative in its own subtle way, like comments muttered under one’s breath.
Chen’s dissonant piano chords and cascades are a notable feature, often laid out carefully and thoughtfully despite their ostensibly abstract splatters. At times, her piano clusters seem despairing, plodding forth like a search party that is compelled to keep moving although it doesn’t want to find what it’s looking for.
Day and Salomon both serve up a mind-bogglingly wide variety of noises, squeezing and wrenching sounds out of their invented instruments. Metal-on-metal scraping and squeaks are part of the sustained, twisted aural textures provided, along with more organic sounds like the simultaneously silly and disturbing gurgling sounds.
On the synthetic side, there are the static rustles of electronic circuits and what sounds like a severely distorted radio transmission of a prerecorded song, and the album ends with a chimpy, toy keyboard playing a preset rhythm/accompaniment that ramps up in tempo to a tiny frenzy along with some kind of frog-sounding wind instrument, bringing the proceedings to an absurd finale.