That old difficult rock is back, being made by a handful of the same people who made it so indigestible and rare in the first place: Singer combines the estimable talents of former U.S. Maple guitarist Todd Rittman and drummer Adam Vita, along with Town & Country/Bird Show man Ben Vida, and Rob Lowe, currently of Lichens and late of 90 Day Men and TV on the Radio. These four gents hail from Chicago, a city with a lot to answer for regarding the sizeable portion of our nation’s avant-garde music they’ve laid upon us.
But when you really start to dissect Singer’s sound, it leads back to the blues, and to U.S. Maple’s deconstruction of it. Dissonant, constantly collapsing, and wheezing towards some grand notion and grander execution of the blues, that band attempted to dismantle the very mechanics of where rock and roll came from–messily separating it into piles all over the floor, still twitching with discovery and nervousness of being discovered. On some compressed timeline, U.S. Maple might have sounded like ZZ Top, but we got all of it, the miscues and the control of the uncontrollable, confounding many and intriguing the few, those determined to solve one of the only challenging puzzles in music during their late ‘90s and early ‘00s existence. Singer, by rule, doesn’t make it too easy; though the pieces are now bigger and easier to classify, they have many more sides now, and some are far too similar to one another. Looks like a job for Mensa.
Or perhaps not. Unhistories’ seven tracks unfold in a logical, almost suite-like manner, forcing the listener to stare into its flats and evening out the jostles with something traditional (here, multi-part male vocal harmonies and stretches of playing chords in time). It gets more exciting as the story rolls on, too, past the thudding, clicking percussive punctuations to the guitar’s lingering single-word sentences of opener “Slow Ghosts” and its somewhat dull follow-up, “Divining.” Think of these as a warm-up period for “Please, Tell the Justices We’re Fine,” where Singer starts to find its legs, racing in and out of a propulsive Krautrock beat and bass combo that eventually concedes to some 5 o’clock whistle jamming, never letting up on its urgency even in its slack, but never fully showing its hand either.
And from here on out, we’re golden: fast or slow, crowded or spare, no moments seem wasted or unnecessary. Artistic choices of where to insert a jagged couplet of guitar chords into the contiguous, speed-crafted surfaces of “Mauvais Sang” are wholly acceptable, because we’ve found a band that knows how to drag the perception of difficulty into that of wonder and kid-gloved amazement, one that is easily put upon the audience, first as a burden, but then as a conversation. It’s a complex machine, this Unhistories, but its makers play off of one another with surprising balance and offhanded, agile performance, salvaging what others might wreck with asymmetry.