Hey, here’s an artist that I truly 100% found on Fuzz, having no prior knowledge of them beforehand. They live in Austria, a place where most people don’t expect to hear much about new music, but they’re well worth your time and attention.
As luck would have had it, I found them through a best guess match via Blip, the neat little Twitter-like audio application/conversation gestation creation now available in the navigation here on Fuzz. You enter in some keywords or the title of a song you’re listening to; Blip tries to find it, and presents a handful of options–the real thing, close matches and the like from a bunch of sources. Whatever I was looking for didn’t turn up, but a number of tracks by Bell Etage did, and since they didn’t have some sort of crazy name like ThEH FuNkY LoRdZzZ, they seemed worthy of notice.
Grateful for having checked them out, I now share the band Bell Etage with you, the Fuzzpublik. As a five-piece vehicle for singer-songwriter material in a young, poetic vein, Bell Etage struck me as pretty cool for two reasons: the overall restless rhythmic shakeup that’s present even in their calmest musical moments, and their use of blunt force, English-as-second-language lyrical delivery. The former owes a big debt to the bustling, anti-industry activity of ‘90s emo, as it separated into (and against) indie rock/pop ideas and its roots in hardcore. Listen to the snaking guitar lines and jagged wrong notes that pop out of a song like “A Drop of the Universe” and understand that not a whole lot of bands trying to play music this sincere and heartfelt actually have the control that these folks do in their attempt to strike such a balance. It speaks of time, experience, and the willingness to be different, all qualities that are shared by far too few acts out there. It’s redolent of a lot of ideas that usually don’t make it too far into songwriting showcases, and the fact that they can bring it across so naturally is quite remarkable. Their album, We Cried the Sunlight Down in the Day, is loaded with similar moments of wild surprise.
Onto the latter. Nobody’s ever expecting to hear someone singing seriously about masturbating in the opening verse of a song–and nobody really should–but it leaves “Feathers in the Washing Machine” with an uneasy feeling that carries right through to an almost immediate tempo shift to faster and more aggressive, hooky terrain. The dusky delivery of these words–odd ones at times, ones that don’t grasp a native subtlety–speak to a different set of rules. Their hustle is strong.
Anyone who likes Modest Mouse, Rainer Maria, Monochrome, any outfits of the brothers Leo (Ted or Chris, maybe even Danny) or the like really ought to check this band out. For playing within the boundaries of what we know to be an indie sound , Bell Etage takes a lot of chances. Those chances don’t translate to great work all of the time, but their yen for musical miscegenation, to weird things out in ways you wouldn’t expect, provide a bounty of real surprising, complex work that really helps to lift them up to the shoulder level of the faceless hordes out there.
Well maybe we should be glad that some Americans know that Germany and Austria are different countries.....Seriously ???
Re: Nobody’s ever expecting to hear someone singing seriously about masturbating in the opening verse of a song.
Ever heard about Nina Hagen ? Well - it's round about 20 years ago....
Hm - I guess there are more parts of the States than countries in Europe where people haven't heard much about new music or songs about masturbation.
Well - maybe you should visit Europe and get rid of your ridiculous prejudices.
Like you, I was first looking for something else and then came across your intriguing review [to say the least] of the Austrian group, Bell Etage. Using your perspectives as a guide, I gave their pieces a listen and agree that there is experience, control, wild surprise, and hustle in their work. Indeed, I would say that their efforts could raise them to a level that puts them above the faceless hordes.
I moved on to the group's bio and noted their own efforts to provide a literary frame to their pieces as follows:
"It's all about sex. Or loneliness, depending on the different characters...The Mojo never really reaches the surface...My house is crowded with...strangers...the songs are made of the observations from out there...They want to tell you what they have to say but in the same moment they don't want to. There is an aura of alarm to it,...It's all about sex, loneliness and silence. But mostly it's about the hope inside..."
I think Bell Etage will give their followers a worthwhile return on the investment of the social capital that one is prepared to expend on them. I'm investing.
Your column and another "intriguing review" I read today in the Wall Street Journal about William Weber's book, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121150113435415929.html?mod=opinion_journal_books
prompted me to consider further the nexus of music and society [which comes first] in the "post-modernist, web-based era" in marked contrast to previous historical periods.
I think it would be instructive to blog about this subject with a view to providing, so-called, "indie artists" [as opposed to "pop artists"] with better grounding about "what's goin' on" in cyberspace; and I would welcome your input then or now.