90 DAY MEN

[it (is) it] critical band

CD, Southern records

Very loose Ui fronted by Mark E. Smith? No? How about: storm&stress go popmusic? Try again, okay,… uhm.. I give up. 90 Day Men are hard to pin down. There is definitely a vision, there is a definite form, though there are certainly no rules, but otherwise their music keeps a mystery around itself. Everything concrete or down-to-earth looses itself like sand running through your fingers. Make it easy for yourself and try to get lost in the groove/flow. A good alternative, but what about the meaning?

What can you say about 90 day men and their new album? The songs start somewhere and end up somewhere else, but that is hardly surprising. They mix a jazz attitude with up-to-date alternative-music-structures and 80ies-new-wave-hints. Fugazi might have a lot to with it, at least the bass plays steady lines, and their groove reminds of Fugazi, but their songs are much looser and not so much to the point. So maybe, some older Dischord-Bands spring to mind, and that is just as good. But then there are complicated guitar-parts reminding of Fred Frith or guitars sounding like a vibraphone, and they combine postmodern-underground-at-rock (for lack of a better word) with jazzy late-night-drums until the song builds up to a furios finale with lots of driving energy. This might be very good on a small stage, if you are in a bar, where you can sit down. Then close your ideas and imagine a young Captain Beefheart in front of you, who wants to play jazz instead of blues. Or Ginsberg reciting another poem-tractat over music. Better stop now, before I start to roll up music history as a whole.

Fact is, that, whenever you try to say something definite about “[it (is) it] critical band” that is more than trivial truism, you find yourself tangled in a spiderweb of contradicting hints and references. Funny though, that all hints and references seem to come moreout of yourself than from the band itself. So the answer you are searching for is somewhere in yourself? Introspection is hard to achieve, especially when confronted or paired with unknown art.

I have an idea for you, to ponder about while listening to this album. If you put a foto or a painting behind glass and hang it on your wall to look at, then there might be a speck or a dint in the glass, that you haven’t seen yet. Now, this speck throws a shadow on the picture, but you don’t know that yet. Sometime later you realize that there is a strange dark spot on your poster or picture, but you think nothing more of it. You feel, that the artist made this spot on purpose and maybe you ponder on what it could mean. Well, in reality you will trace the point back to mechanical failure in reproduction or something like that, but you won’t link it to yourself. Anyway, this speck becomes a part of the artistical work on your wall, at least for you. My question: is this work of art now less worth than before, the same or even more?

Actually, I just wanted to make you think about art for a moment. Definitely, I see 90 Day Men as an artistic adventure. Don’t tell me it’s just rock-music, because it’s not. But you won’t be able to enjoy this, if you aren’t ready to think about art as a whole, as a factor in society and in personal lives. Moreover, don’t let the thinking and talking about art be done by Marilyn Manson r Tool or any other Major-Label-New-Metal-Act. For this is what they are, acts. Art lives within the recipient (The artist himself is the primary recipient.) and without you it is nothing. What you need is a mind, a critical mind. So maybe this is what 90 day men are here for: to be a critical band for critical listeners. And that is much more than just wordplay.

04/2001