Introduction

PLASTICITY (1992)
1) Low Cool; 2) Soul Vine (70 Billion People); 3) Resonator; 4) Inside The Electronic Revolution; 5) From Another Source; 6) Deep Time; 7) Back To Brazilia; 8) Neutron Factory; 9) Delmas 19; 10) Cooled Out; 11) Invisible Generation; 12) Soulenoid.
One thing I got to say in favor of those late-period albums by Mallinder and Kirk: at least they brought the darkness back. By the late Eighties, they had almost turned into a pretty shallow, pure-dance-oriented techno band, with just enough electronic quirks and smirks to be (sometimes way too undeservedly) classified as «acid house», but still taking the I out of IDM at every oppor­tunity. With Plasticity, they managed to at least partially revert the process, and return to making music injected with the proper paranoia virus — joining the club of dark-minded electronic wi­zards with a penchant for using the extremes of technology to warn us humans about the extremes of technology. There is no talk here of being on the cutting edge, but as far as early Nineties' elec­tronic music goes, this record does not seem particularly out-of-touch or ridiculous to me.
Not that I'm all that interested in discussing it. One ambient techno track after another, sometimes harsher, sometimes softer, usually with a few vocal overdubs — however, for the first time ever Mallinder does not sing at all, letting the music and the vocal samples do all the talking, which is at once good (because we're all kind of tired of his paranoid whispery declamations already) and bad (because it was an integral part of their identity), so that's one less detail to discuss. A typical track is ʻSoulenoidʼ, which completes the record: steady rhythm, pulsating acid bass, one atmos­pheric synth part forming a grey sonic cloud in the background, a six-note alarm-triggering synth riff responsible for all «movement», and some dialog sampled from some sci-fi movie or other to raise the level of tension. Seems cool, right? But the formula is reused way too often, and almost each of the tracks is like six or seven minutes long.
That said, I'm fairly sure you could play about half of these tracks back-to-back with Aphex Twin, and most people wouldn't know the difference — that's the big problem with electronic music in general, because these textures make it pretty hard to package a part of your spirit with them. As I said, the «return to the dark side» is most welcome, but the fact is, a huge lot of electronic artists create «dark» music (many more, in fact, than those that create «light» music), and there's no wonder in the fact that Plasticity simply sank to the bottom in an instant, without making any­body raise an eyebrow. The very fact of me not getting too irritated by the record (except for its horrendous length) should probably be a compliment, though — it is neither original nor memo­rable, but neither is it stupid. They are definitely still looking for something, and working their twin asses off, and so let us show at least a bit of critical respect by not saying "they should have retired and left us in peace by now".
INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE (1993)
1) Everything Is True; 2) Radical Chic; 3) Taxi Mutant; 4) Let It Come Down; 5) Afterglow; 6) The Root; 7) Millenium; 8) Belly Of The Beast; 9) Other World.
More sophisticated techno from the now-obscure couple who just refuse to quit. There are some significant differences from last time around: apparently, «international language» means saying goodbye to some of the more «acid» excesses and concentrating upon grooves, loops, and sam­ples of a smoother, softer variety, with high-pitched, chime-like frequencies largely replacing the squeaky-squelchy burps of Plasticity. In layman terms, this means that International Language is not so much going to kick your ass as it's going to pat you on it, although the whole thing is still much too dark and grumpy to bring in the «sexiness» of Groovy, Laidback And Nasty (and thank God for that!).
On the grand scale of things, this changes nothing: as background muzak for huge electronica fans, there's no problem with the album, but miracles are not going to happen, and chances of any of these tunes to linger on in your head once they have performed their applied function seem rather ephemere. I like the attention to detail — for instance, the mechanism of slowly «breeding» the techno groove of ʻEverything Is Trueʼ as it grows out of some musique concrète, generating all of its overdubbed samples before the rhythmic base is properly established; however, once it is properly established, it just becomes a generic techno dance number. I also suppose that ʻRadical Chicʼ might be an actual tribute to Chic — I'm not sure if they sample any Chic material here, but the track sure sounds the way a proper techno cover of Chic should sound — and that is probably creative, but techno reinventions of disco oldies are not really my thing (I usually have to come up with excuses for why I like this or that particular disco song, and I'd have to come up with twice the number of said excuses for a disco-techno hybrid).
ʻLet It Come Downʼ is a little reminiscent of the old days, with a very thick, very grumpy-soun­ding bassline, rhythmic industrial clanging in the background and a pseudo-brass riff from a spy movie rotating in the background — if not for the relentless techno punch and the lack of de­pressive guitar drones, you'd almost mistake it for a leftover from the old days, and I'd love to see it torn out of this context and placed on a more impressive album as a moody instrumental inter­lude. However, apart from it and maybe the cute combination of the surreptitious-subtle funky bassline and «hooting owl» gimmick of ʻBelly Of The Beastʼ, nothing else truly stands out. So when we get to the finale of ʻOther Worldʼ, and the rhythmic base falls out, leaving us with no­thing but pure New Agey ambience of electronic swirls and distant echoes, the effect is a bit baffling — you mean to say that this was an artistic statement all along, not merely a collection of well-wrought grooves to help the blood flow?..
I suppose there should be an inevitable crack at the title here — something along the lines of «if this kind of techno is indeed supposed to represent ʻinternational languageʼ by default, I sure wish Mallinder and Kirk stuck to all things national» — but the album, like most of their late period efforts, is really not too bad, and it manages to preserve a tiny pinch of their unique identity. I'm pretty sure it could even appeal to major fans of electronic music, like a Susan Tedeschi album might appeal to major blues fans. I just can't get rid of the feeling that ever since CV switched over to electronics completely, they found themselves locked in this compromised state, where everything they'd do would work to some degree, but never to the degree of leaving a lasting imprint on the music genre. But who knows? Maybe in twenty years' time you'll see Internatio­nal Language reappraised as a lost masterpiece, and people will be ready to donate all of their Aphex Twin collection for a used copy. The Grand DJ works in mysterious ways.
THE CONVERSATION (1994)
1) Exterminating Angel (Intro); 2) Brutal But Clean; 3) The Message; 4) Let's Start; 5) Night Rider; 6) I Think; 7) The Heat; 8) Harmonic Parallel; 9) Project80; 10) Exterminating Angel (Outro).
Although this is still credited to Cabaret Voltaire, the liner notes explicitly state that the album was "composed, programmed, arranged, and sonically orchestrated by R. H. Kirk", so apparently Mallinder's involvement here was minimal at best — not that you'd really notice, considering that his trademark vocals had been completely absent on the previous two records as well; and truly, there is not a lot of stylistic difference between all three, except for maybe this Conversation showing an even more claustrophobic spirit than ever before.
What the album is really most notable for, though, is its duration — spread across two CDs, with the second one largely consisting of a single 53-minute long collage, ʻProject80ʼ, featuring long samples of movie dialog interpolated with industrial clang-a-bang. The track actually sounds closer in spirit to «classic» Cabaret Voltaire than anything they'd done in a long time, except that there are no signs of returning to a guitar sound — but the effort is on gray dirty noise rather than danceable patterns, with the atmosphere changing from industrial to militaristic to post-stormy ambient and back again several times. It's a bit of an excruciating listen, but perhaps it is accep­table as a last testament of sorts, a pompous reappraisal of the Cabaret Voltaire legacy and all the emotional turmoil it represents for easily impressionable people.
Neither its individual parts, though, nor the much shorter tracks on the first CD lend themselves any easier to description than any bits and pieces on International Language. The two-part ʻExterminating Angelʼ may own its title to a Buñuel movie, but it is neither as suspenseful nor as bizarre as its filmed counterpart — just a set of cloudy tape loops generating a mixed atmosphere of serenity and faraway ominous danger, with percussion overdubs added in the «outro» part so you can dance to the atmosphere of serenity and faraway ominous danger. Likewise, everything else works like smooth, inobtrusive, barely noticeable background muzak that seems to gravitate towards «chill-out» now out of its original «acid» inclinations. Occasionally, there's a touch of something different (ʻThe Heatʼ reworks a reggae groove; ʻHarmonic Parallelʼ lazily stutters along to a relaxed trip-hop beat), but some of the keyboard loops are downright cheesy — the one on ʻBrutal But Cleanʼ sounds like something Modern Talking could find some use for. In other words, the small highs are balanced by equally small lows, and most of the time you get bland background neutrality.
In fact, considering that Kirk's solo albums from the same period, recorded for Warp, are more adventurous on the whole, it is somewhat of a relief that he and Mallinder finally pulled the plug on the Cabaret Voltaire thing later that year. Let's face it — the CV spirit got old and debilitated by the late Eighties, and despite a few last-minute shots of darkness that they tried to administer for Body And Soul, this whole techno thing that they got going in the Nineties was not proper Cabaret Voltaire — and proper Cabaret Voltaire was so tightly bound to the New Wave and mid-Eighties era that there was no way they could artificially stimulate it for a long time anyway. Obviously, if there's something they are going to be remembered by, it will be those albums where Kirk is grinding out his creepy-nasty guitar cobwebs and Mallinder is running from phan­tom dangers through smelly underground sewers. Anything that comes later, no matter how in­offensive or even mildly creative, will be superfluous.

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN

TELEPHONE FREE LANDSLIDE VICTORY (1985)
1) The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon; 2) Border Ska; 3) Wasted; 4) Yanqui Go Home; 5) Oh No!; 6) Nine Of Disks; 7) Payed Vacation: Greece; 8) Where The Hell Is Bill?; 9*) Wasting All Your Time; 10*) Epigram #5; 11*) At Kuda; 12*) Epigram #2; 13*) Cowboys From Hollywood; 14*) Colonel Enrique Adolfo Bermudez; 15) Vladivostock; 16) Skinhead Stomp; 17) Tina; 18) Take The Skinheads Bowling; 19) Mao Reminisces About His Days In Southern China; 20) I Don't See You; 21) Balalaika Gap; 23) Opi Rides Again; 24) Club Med Sucks; 25) Ambiguity Song.
Those unfortunate (or fortunate) souls whose youth was not spent in Eighties' America would pro­bably, in retrospect, think of «college rock» as represented by either leftist hardcore bands or leftist folk-rock bands (of the more subtle variety, like R.E.M., or of the more straightforward one, like 10,000 Maniacs). As one begins digging a little deeper, though, all sorts of oddities begin to come out — including acts that are fairly hard to categorize, since one of their intentions was to avoid becoming easily pigeonholed, at all costs. And among such acts, few can boast a higher level of oddball-ness than the oddball-some-titled Camper Van Beethoven (originally — Camper Van Beethoven and The Border Patrol), founded by a bunch of eccentric Californians with guitar player and singer David Lowery at the core center.
Unlike the abrasive, avantgarde-influenced young noisemakers dominating the underground, Camper Van Beethoven did not seem to care much about pushing forward musical boundaries (being largely content with however wide they'd already been pushed) or about making their music as basically «inaccessible» and «unlistenable» as possible. With minimal exceptions (only a tiny handful of these tracks experiment with dissonance, e. g. ʽNine Of Disksʼ), all the music on this album is well within certain established traditions — Camper Van Beethoven like various forms of pop, punk, punk-pop, pop-punk, and country-western, though their major love spot is reserved for the venerable musical form of ska (or polka, if you'd rather like an Eastern rather than Western hemisphere analogy, although Campers don't exactly huddle the accordeon).
The ska-based tracks on the band's debut largely seem to function as instrumental interludes — but do not make the mistake of writing them off as insignificant, because if there's anything truly exciting and original about Camper's musical agenda, most of it is concealed in these instrumen­tals. With two guitarists and a talented multi-instrumentalist (Jonathan Segel on violin, mandolin, and various keyboards) involved, they present humorous and inventive twists on just about every musical genre that ends up on the roulette wheel. Beginning fairly innocently with some pop elec­tric guitar on ʽBorder Skaʼ; they follow it up with a country twist on ʽYanqui Go Homeʼ; go Near Eastern on ʽAt Kudaʼ; zip into Mexico for ʽColonel Enrique Adolfo Bermudezʼ (there are some spoken vocals on that one, but it falls in the same ska-based category); try to summon a Russian vibe — in my opinion, somewhat unsuccessfully — on ʽVladivostockʼ; later try to do it again, with slightly more satisfactory results, on ʽBalalaika Gapʼ (that's a mandolin, though, hardly an authentic balalaika); and reach an absolute climactic peak on ʽMao Reminisces About His Days In Southern Chinaʼ — a less smart band would probably just slap a title like this onto any random piece of improvised shit, but the Campers actually make an effort to play a doubled guitar/violin melody that is reminiscent of a Chinese folk melody. It's catchy, it's funny, and, strangest of all, it is actually touching in some way — I'm still trying to figure out why, though.
It would be very easy to just write off this «jamaicaization» of various music genres as a cheap gimmick, and I cannot, in fact, exclude that, given the band's general penchant for satire and irony, all of this was essentially performed as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the «world music» scene that was shaping up in the mid-Eighties. But there's too much thought and genuine feeling behind it all to reduce all the spectrum to just humor and parody — you might as well say that the band breathes new life in these clichéd old genres by grafting them onto an ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ kind of stock. And although there is not a lot of complexity involved, the performances are sur­prisingly diligent and well-rehearsed: these guys took the DIY ethics seriously — if you really have to do it yourself, you might as well do it fuckin' good.
In between all the instrumental fun, you have the actual songs — also with a fairly wide range, though not nearly as all-encompassing as the ska bits. As could be expected, most of these are written in an absurdist paradigm, but not a particularly nonsensical or dadaist one: this is an Ame­rican band, and the situations they invent are more Saturday Night Live than Monty Python, be it Lassie's self-sacrificing journey to outer space (ʽThe Day That Lassie Went To The Moonʼ), the brainless spasms of youth rebellion (ʽClub Med Sucksʼ), or lazy indignation at the absence of a band member for the rehearsals (ʽWhere The Hell Is Bill?ʼ, referring to the original drummer Bill McDonald, who actually left way before these sessions even started — "maybe he went to see The Circle Jerks!"). Musically, they sound strangely more rugged and amateurish than the ska pieces — almost as if this were a completely different band playing at times — but no less odd, particularly when they cover Black Flag's fifty-second hardcore classic ʽWastedʼ as a slow roots-rock number with a prominent fiddle part; and the best of these tunes also happen to be insanely catchy and even uplifting — ʽTake The Skinheads Bowlingʼ is rightfully considered a classic not because it deals with skinheads, but because it is a terrific piece of jangle-pop, and once again, Segel's violin work is highly commendable.
Things are neatly tied together with the closing number, ʽAmbiguity Songʼ, something that would not sound out of place at your local hoedown, but whose main point is to deliver, in condensed form, the main message of the entire album: "Everything seems to be up in the air at this time / One day soon, it'll all settle down / But everything seems to be up in the air at this time" — deli­vered in an ever so slightly worried, but ultimately calm and ironic fashion. All the more ironic, that is, considering how it was all baked way back in 1985, yet still seems so relevant at the end of the distantly futuristic 2016: the album sounds every bit as charming now as it did back then, and I am absurdly happy to render a well-deserved thumbs up verdict.
(Technical note: the 24-track CD issue of the album is actually much longer than the original due to the insertion in its middle of the entire contents of the contemporary EP Take The Skinheads Bowling, including an early version of the classic ʽCowboys From Hollywoodʼ. Another tech­nical note is that the album itself was supposed to be named Telephone Tree Landslide Victory, but apparently the label guys messed up and got Free instead of Tree — which, in my as well as the band's opinion, actually improves on the original proposition.)
II & III (1986)
1) Abundance; 2) Cowboys From Hollywood; 3) Sad Lovers' Waltz; 4) Turtlehead; 5) I Love Her All The Time; 6) No Flies On Us; 7) Down And Out; 8) No Krugerrands For David; 9) (Don't You Go To) Goleta; 10) 4 Year Plan; 11) (We're A) Bad Trip; 12) Circles; 13) Dustpan; 14) Sometimes; 15) Chain Of Circumstance; 16) ZZ Top Goes To Egypt; 17) Cattle (Reversed); 18) Form Another Stone; 19) No More Bullshit.
The title of this album is first and foremost intended to look cool, but also reflects some objective truth, considering that about half of it was recorded while drummer Anthony Guess was still in the band (and new guitarist Greg Lisher had just joined), and the other half was made after the drummer's departure, with Molla and Lowery splitting the drum work between themselves (per­manent replacement Chris Pedersen only arrived in time to record one track, the rough garage-rocker ʽ(We're A) Bad Tripʼ).
In all honesty, though, Camper Van Beethoven is more about the collective spirit than individual personalities, and we are not going to be seriously tracing all the complicated comings and goings here — the only thing that matters is whether they affect that spirit or not, and II & III, by all accounts, remains unaffected. Not that it sounds like a copy of the debut: on the contrary, there are some serious changes made, as the band largely abandons the «remake everything as a ska groove» principle, and branches out into additional directions; anything goes, as long as it's got good rhythm and as long as you can put a slightly weird spin on it.
The only problem is that this time around, there's no seeming conceptual unity to the recordings at all — all you can do is fondly enjoy its light-hearted attitude and fish out occasional moments of musical brilliance. Two songs only go for some sort of social message, one of them doing so brilliantly (the abovementioned ʽBad Tripʼ, a sneering putdown of those who "live such bright and flashing lives" with top-notch energy and a classic neo-garage riff) and the other not so bril­liantly (ʽNo More Bullshitʼ — a last-minute outburst of sloganeering is not going to save the day, even if you happen to agree with the song's sentiments such as "no more MTV, no more rock stars... Elvis Presley died and no one knows why!"; musically, the song sounds like somebody took a sonic experiment off Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and normalized it — well, okay, but it does not agree so perfectly with the verbal message). The rest is a smorgasbord of pop, folk, country, psychedelia, punk, and yes, just a little bit of ska... actually, more of a Slavo­nic dance, as corroborated by its prominent «mandolaika» lead part and the telling title ʽ4 Year Planʼ (I guess 5-year plans were too much to handle for a band with this much impatience).
Again, though, the most musically brilliant pieces are those instrumentals on which Segel's violin gets top billing — ʽNo Krugerrands For Davidʼ is a mad send-up of Jewish dance music, but my personal favorite is ʽZZ Top Goes To Egyptʼ, where near-Eastern violin lines are psychedelically spiced up with echo effects and placed on top of a bluesy vamp that, honestly, does not sound much like ZZ Top, but then I'm not really sure who the hell it sounds like, so might as well be ZZ Top. Other instrumentals are not nearly as interesting; for instance, ʽDustpanʼ is sort of what you'd expect a basic punk-rock song to sound like if the chainsaw buzz was replaced with bursts of acoustic jangle — an idea that seems intriguing in theory, but turns out boring in practice. How­ever, check out the excellent ʽTurtleheadʼ: seventy-five seconds of a crazyass country-punk-noise hybrid with unexpected time, tone, and mood shifts around every corner, a track that even ends up having a distinctly King Crimson-ian feel to it while it lasts.
Of the remaining vocal numbers, Sonic Youth's ʽI Love Her All The Timeʼ, remade as a rollickin' bluegrass number, deserves some attention for the novelty factor; ʽChain Of Circumstanceʼ is an attempt at twee-pop, ruined by bad vocals; and ʽForm Another Stoneʼ might be an overlooked psychedelic masterpiece from these guys — parodic as it is, the violin parts, laced with echo and phasing effects, wind themselves around the guitar jangle in a decidedly mind-blowing fashion. But even so, brilliance and senselessness go hand in hand on the album: for every winner, there's a relative loser, and overall, a bit of quality control probably wouldn't hurt. I appreciate, for in­stance, that the violin on ʽSad Lovers' Waltzʼ occasionally ends up reproducing the violin lines on the Beatles' ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ, but the song as a whole does nothing for me, either as a sincere country number or as parody, whatever.
In short, II & III might as well be subtitled The Brilliant & The Pointless, a record that, far more so than the debut, highlights the band's virtues and flaws. Listening to this, you get the feeling that they could have easily done a great «serious» album in some sort of country-punk style — but chose the humble-pretentious path of self-deflation and reckless branching out with no particular place to go instead. If they were the Beatles and this was their White Album, they might get away with it, but I'll still take ʽWild Honey Pieʼ over ʽDustpanʼ, because the art of painting evocative musical pictures with musical trifles is a dang hard art to do well, and Camper Van Beethoven do it well... well, about 45% of the time. Which is still darn impressive for a mid-Eighties Californian band, so an honest thumbs up it is anyway.
CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN (1986)
1) Good Guys & Bad Guys; 2) Joe Stalin's Cadillac; 3) Five Sticks; 4) Lulu Land; 5) Une Fois; 6) We Saw Jerry's Daughter; 7) Surprise Truck; 8) Stairway To Heavan (Sic); 9) The History Of Utah; 10) Still Wishing To Course; 11) We Love You; 12) Hoe Yourself Down; 13) Peace & Love; 14) Folly; 15) Interstellar Overdrive; 16) Shut Us Down.
On their third album, Camper Van Beethoven continue to «normalize» their sound, in this parti­cular case, «normalization» being the equivalent of showing how much they love rock music from the late Sixties and early Seventies (and hey, who doesn't? Oh, okay, today some people don't, but what else could those intelligent college-rock kids from the Eighties choose as the main source of inspiration? Barry White?). More often than not, the inspiration is indirect: for instance, they take Led Zep-based song titles (ʽFive Sticksʼ, ʽStairway To Heavanʼ) and use them for psy­chedelic freakouts — the former is ʽThe Ambiguity Songʼ backwards, the latter is ʽMao Reminiscesʼ backwards (and somehow not completely losing its original charm in the process). Or, for instance, they express their reverence for the Grateful Dead by poking gentle fun at Deadheads (ʽWe Saw Jerry's Daughterʼ, which, incidentally, is also one of the album's fastest and catchiest pop numbers — although it doesn't sound much like a Grateful Dead song at all).
But just so you know that you can never properly predict the Campers' next move, they go out on a limb and introduce a faithful, as-note-for-note-as-possible rendition of Pink Floyd's ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ — somewhat stripped down compared to the original, but still with tremendous atten­tion to detail. Needless to say, a cover like that really only works in the context of the album: it adds nothing to the classic ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ experience, but it matters all the world to us that it is done here by the same guys who, in their regular hours, produce sarcastic deconstruc­tions of all the musical genres in the world.
There is also more emphasis on the lyrical message and the surrealist stories behind the music, fortunately, not at the expense of musical ideas. ʽGood Guys & Bad Guysʼ and ʽJoe Stalin's Cadillacʼ start things off with some political flavor — the former addresses the Russian issue from the point of view of an easy-going redneck (or college dropout, whatever) lazily basking in the sun, and the latter somehow jabs and stabs at all the dictatorial powers in the world, though I am still not exactly sure how; I guess that "Well my cadillac is Johnson's cadillac, is Stalin's cadillac, is Somoza's cadillac..." implies that dictators only become dictators because we allow them to, but then again, maybe it does not imply anything at all, and the whole thing is just an excuse for some reckless boogie fun. (And again, there's a completely ad hoc Led Zeppelin refe­rence at the end of the song — purely by association, led on by the word "bridge" in the line "gonna drive my cadillac off a bridge". What do you think when you hear the word "bridge"? You must not be a true Led Zep fan if you think something different).
On a slighter note, ʽThe History Of Utahʼ tackles you-know-what, presenting a very alternative history of the estab­lishment of the Church of Latter-day Saints to the sound of a droning psycho-boogie with a pen­chant for abrupt tempo changes; and ʽWe Love Youʼ is a variation on ʽThe Devil Went Down To Georgiaʼ, with a notable change in the theme (the Devil becomes a member of the band rather than taking the souls of its members). Still, both songs do reflect certain prob­lems that the band members seem to have with religious practices — and their irreverence ex­tends even to the very psychedelia that seems to fuel this record (ʽLulu Landʼ, a parody on the mind-opening, transcendental nature of flower power era psychedelic anthems).
On the whole, though, as fun as the record is on a first-come, first-serve basis, the remaining impression is, well, not quite as impressive as before. Too many of the songs just sound like jokes, made tastier through the factor of unpredictability — but jokes all the same. As far as actual songs are concerned, ʽGood Guys & Bad Guysʼ is arguably the only number here that qualifies: everything else is either a parody, or a brief freakout, or a passable, but straightforward genre experiment (ʽHoe Yourself Downʼ sure sounds good, but its meaning here is only gained in the context of other songs — normally, if you want this type of fast country dance by itself, you go to Nashville, don't you?), or, well, ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ. Still a thumbs up, of course, but I find myself pining for all those ska instrumentals.