Introduction

OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART (1988)
1) Eye Of Fatima (pt. 1); 2) Eye Of Fatima (pt. 2); 3) O Death; 4) She Divines Water; 5) Devil Song; 6) One Of These Days; 7) Turquoise Jewelry; 8) Waka; 9) Change Your Mind; 10) My Path Belated; 11) Never Go Back; 12) The Fool; 13) Tania; 14) Life Is Grand.
Always, always comes that day when the miserable reviewer, hungry for words, subjects and hooks, finally gets the chance to write: «Major changes on band so-and-so's most recent album! Finally, they have been able to secure a major label contract and professional recording quality, and so...» ...then you allow yourself a few seconds to take the decision whether it made them great or it made them suck (usually the latter), and from then on it's a fairly smooth ride.
The problem is, I did not even notice anything that would suggest Camper Van Beethoven had such a bout of fortune. And it's not like I couldn't have noticed — on second listen, you do notice a much louder drum sound than before, and a denser, yet cleaner mix than before, courtesy of pro­ducer Dennis Herring, assigned to them by Virgin Records. And it's not as if I haven't noticed some stylistic changes, either, as the band takes on a slightly more serious face than before, and comes up with a much larger number of «normal» songs than before. But never for the life of me would I want to ascribe that change to a commercial urge — Lowery and friends normally act as if the division between «commercial» and «non-commercial» never existed for them in the first place. It's not as if they began largely playing free-form jazz and then slowly migrated to pop formats; there was nothing self-consciously «weird» about their music, other than a never-ending drive to freely translate stuff from one musical idiom into another.
And so, on this first album for Virgin, the band simply gives us more of the same, except that the selected musical forms are now almost completely restricted to whatever was en vogue a good fifteen years ago — retro pop-rock, retro folk-rock, retro prog-rock, with a bit of glam and proto-punk thrown in for good measure. All too often, Lowery's guitar and Segel's violin combine to give things a definite country-and-western slant, but whenever that happens, psychedelic effects and melodic overdubs, as well as surrealist lyrics, are added to make sure that the band properly sounds like "cowboys on acid" (ʽEye Of Fatimaʼ), combining hillbilly paraphernalia with a hippie attitude: I'm sure somewhere out there, off some lonesome cloud, Hank Williams is surreptitious­ly eyeing them with fondness in his heart.
A few songs would suggest that the band is taking a darker turn — early on, their slow country dance take on the traditional ʽO Deathʼ sounds both ironically irreverent and a bit creepy, because you never can tell with these guys if they are doing a parody or a parallel-universe reinvention; and the fact that they took this old Appalachian dark folk number and turned it into a catchy folk-pop tune somehow makes it creepier. But there is no generally underlying dark current to the al­bum — in fact, the final song explicitly states that "and life is grand... and I will say this at the risk of falling from favor / With those of you who have appointed yourselves / To expect us to say something darker". Behind all of these gestures really lies the same old — a stark desire to never be pigeonholed: considering that «college rock» or «underground rock» is typically associ­ated with a punkish or at least just a generally mopey attitude towards life, Lowery and Co. feel like they have to present themselves as optimists, even if ʽO Deathʼ might seem to suggest the opposite. Why they never went out with a passionate cover of ABBA's ʽDancing Queenʼ, though, I have no idea.
That's all fine, though; more questionable is their decision to include some instrumentals where the emphasis is not on genre-mashing as it used to be, but rather on pure atmospherics — the second part of ʽEye Of Fatimaʼ is not unlike some pseudo-Led Zeppelin folk-metal experiment, with a mix of acoustic picking and blazing electric guitar god soloing, and later on they pretty much repeat the same thing with ʽWakaʼ; still later, ʽThe Foolʼ is a psycho-metallic waltz that you could probably hear from the likes of Jeff Beck in one of his particularly eccentric periods. It's okay, but Greg Lisher, responsible for lead guitar, is hardly a great guitar virtuoso, and if I am not all that tempted to play air guitar on these songs, then I am not sure what they really are there for — I'd rather go back to my Led Zep and Fairport Convention records.
Less questionable is the decision to just write some nice, fun songs — ʽNever Go Backʼ, ʽOne Of These Daysʼ, ʽChange Your Mindʼ, and the somewhat mysterious ʽTaniaʼ (whose messy lyrics seem loaded with the Jean-Luc Godard spirit) are all friendly, catchy and just sound cool on those front porches where Garth Brooks would not fit in. There's nothing too deep or pretentious con­cealed in them — merely an attempt to create conventional, but not boring roots-rock that could be palatable to the highly demanding listener. I'm really not sure how to follow this with an in­appropriately deep-sounding conclusion, so I'll just leave you with another thumbs up, though perhaps a less excited one than on the band's debut, where it did look like they wanted to subvert conventional musical rules — here, all they want to do is to follow them creatively.
KEY LIME PIE (1989)
1) Opening Theme; 2) Jack Ruby; 3) Sweethearts; 4) When I Win The Lottery; 5) (I Was Born In A) Laundromat; 6) Borderline; 7) The Light From A Cake; 8) June; 9) All Her Favorite Fruit; 10) Interlude; 11) Flowers; 12) The Humid Press Of Days; 13) Pictures Of Matchstick Men; 14) Come On Darkness.
With this album, the first stage of the existence of Camper Van Beethoven comes to a — rather somber — close. Apparently, the group began to splinter even before the recording started, with the loss of Jonathan Segel being a particularly heavy blow: they do their best to mask his absence by hiring non-member Don Lax and, later still, temporary member Morgan Fichter to play the violin, but it is, perhaps, not so much the presence/absence of the fiddle sound as it is a certain intuitively felt disappearance of one shade of rainbow that is the main problem.
Every review of Key Lime Pie that you read is going to focus on two aspects of this record: (a) it is noticeably darker and less idealistic than before (as if you couldn't tell, what with the very last track being named ʽCome On Darknessʼ and all); (b) it is less musically diverse, with most songs molded in a relatively traditional Americana pattern, with heavy folk, country, and blues influen­ces. Throw in a bunch of politicized lyrics every now and then, and you'd easily get the impres­sion that Lowery and his pals are trying to get «serious» and «make a statement», essentially betraying Camper's original un-ideology, either in the vain hope to score extra financial success (which they actually did, since Key Lime Pie sold noticeably better than they used to), or be­cause they have outgrown their adolescent phase and are no longer so obstinate about making «art for art's sake».
Certainly this impression is at its strongest with the album's first song, ʽJack Rubyʼ, which uses the title character as an abstract allegory for the mess we're in ("now we think it's a virtue to simply survive / but it feels like this calm it's decaying / it's collapsing under its own weight"). It's a long, repetitive, gloomy folk-rock ballad, one that probably begs to be covered by a Joan Baez or, who knows, even a Bob Dylan (certainly wouldn't feel out of place on one of his late period albums like Modern Times). With a sparse arrangement, largely reduced to a ringing rhythm guitar and an angry distorted lead guitar track with a penchant for sustained notes and whammy bar abuse, this is as close to an apocalyptic mood as the Campers ever get.
Skip ahead several tracks, though, and songs like ʽJuneʼ will show you that essentially, it's just David Lowery in a really, really bad mood. "Are you weary of the lengthening days?", he asks, "do you secretly wish for November's rain?", and goes on to conclude, "there is nothing in this world more bitter than Spring". Musically, this is probably the album's most interesting and innovative number, a dark waltz that shifts keys and becomes even darker midway through, all the time staying very heavy on the strings, with a psychedelic chamber arrangement somewhere in between country-western and modern classical — but its words and its basic mood suggest, first and foremost, that something just went really rotten on the inside. It's like the band just doesn't feel like having fun any more — not some sort of conscious decision to «get deeper and darker», but merely an instinctive reflection of some nasty virus eating up the soul.
The only track on the album that is not altogether infused with this nasty feel is (in yet another nod to the great god of unpredictability) the band's cover of Status Quo's ʽPictures Of Matchstick Menʼ, with the slide guitar riff lovingly recreated by Morgan Fichter's violin, but otherwise fairly loyal to the original. However, in its lonely position, stuck in between a bunch of morose tracks, it sounds more like a melancholically nostalgic tribute to long gone days of hippie happiness than an idealistic attempt to bring those days back. And how could it be taken with a light heart, really, after all these songs that deal with pissed-off loser dreams (ʽWhen I Win The Lotteryʼ — "when the end comes to this old world / the rats will cry and the rest will curl up"), venting frustration accumulated at the bottom of the social ladder (ʽI Was Born In A Laundromatʼ), the impossibility of getting satisfaction even from blessed escapism (ʽBorderlineʼ — ska rhythms return with a gritty, snappy vengeance and conclude that "on the borderline everything is empty, even you and I"), and the uselessness of romance (ʽAll Her Favorite Fruitʼ, said to be based around a love line from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but applicable to any situation in which a pair of lovers feel like "we are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof")?
All in all, this was clearly not a happy period in the band's life, but the album on the whole still qualifies as a good one — there's plenty of catchy choruses, enough tracks like ʽJuneʼ that can still grab your attention with unusual and beautiful textures, and Lowery is as good at transmit­ting the aura of weariness and dissatisfaction as he is at being a smartass cynic with a sharp sense of humor. Not every band that started out with such effective absurdity as ʽThe Day That Lassie Went To The Moonʼ could bring it to such a convincingly morose finale as ʽCome On Darknessʼ, even if it does make you wonder if there's a certain natural law that inevitably leads The Joker on to becoming The Undertaker (then again, so far it hasn't really worked on Weird Al Yankovic, to say the least). I give it a thumbs up, but beware — you will only enjoy it if you did not dig all those previous Camper records merely for being «hilarious».
CAMPER VANTIQUITIES (1993)
1) Heart; 2) Never Go Back; 3) Seven Languages; 4) Axe Murderer Song; 5) SP37957; 6) Crossing Over; 7) Guar­dian Angels; 8) I'm Not Like Everybody Else; 9) A. C. Cover; 10) Porpoise Mouth; 11) We Workers Do Not Under­stand Modern Art; 12) We Eat Your Children; 13) Six More Miles To The Graveyard; 14) Ice Cream Everyday; 15) Processional; 16) Photograph / Om Eye.
Naturally, with the band no longer existing, what a better time to start digging in the vaults? From the loving hands of bassist Victor Krummenacher comes this odds-and-ends package that inclu­ded, in its entirety, the EP Vampire Can Mating Oven, originally released in 1987, along with ten previously unreleased tracks from various sessions. Considering that the EP is also available today on the expanded CD issue of the self-titled third album, and that the non-EP odds-and-ends do not add any startling surprises to what we already know about the Campers, this is not a very essential release, but still a nice one.
Actually, Mating Oven was a damn fine EP that is well worth having in any configuration. It has some of the band's catchiest tunes — Lowery's ʽHeartʼ is a very ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ-esque piece of guitar-based ska-pop, with an almost unnoticeable tongue-in-cheek attitude; ʽNever Go Backʼ is also ska-pop, but this time with a swampy slide guitar lead and a folksier vocal melody, ironically admonishing us all to "never go back" (nice to hear from a band that always went back... then again, to be fair, it's more like they were all walking forwards while looking back­wards); ʽIce Cream Everydayʼ is one of their few stabs at synth-pop, with cold electronic patterns matching the "ice cream" lyrics — not great, but amusing; and leave it to Camper Van Beethoven to resort to «oblique strategies» and pull a Ringo Starr cover out of their sleeve — ʽPhotographʼ remains as cool as the day Ringo and George put the final touches on it, though there's hardly anything of importance that the band adds to it here (unless you are so seriously biased against Ringo as a singer and as an artist that you only agree to listen to his good stuff when it's being done by somebody else — in which case, shame on you).
The one true masterpiece on the EP, however, is ʽSeven Languagesʼ, one of Camper's most blissfully arranged tracks — funky, with a threatening, serpentine, «poisonous» wah-wah lead line driving the song, light-Gothic keyboards, and lyrics that could, for once, relate to most of us as we bumble through life without really managing to do anything worthwhile. If only there were some space left for hooks in the vocal melody, it could be a great classic of the decade — as it is, it does not quite amount to, say, the level of mopey Cure classics, but it comes fairly close.
As for the rest of the tracks, it's mostly generic CvB rootsy stuff — sometimes with really cool titles like ʽWe Workers Do Not Understand Modern Artʼ (seems like an early version of or a vari­ation on the ʽMao Reminiscesʼ instrumental, actually), sometimes with really incongruent titles (ʽWe Eat Your Childrenʼ is a bit of Mexican folk, with prominent acoustic lead parts — unless we're talking real tender, playful, soothing cannibalism here), and sometimes with shocking lyrics (ʽAxe Murderer Songʼ is like Lennon's ʽWorking Class Heroʼ, only with a completely new set of existentialist questions such as "why do axe murderers only attack when we're making love?"). Hiding somewhere in the middle is another randomly gratuitous cover of a classic — this time it's ʽI'm Not Like Everybody Elseʼ by The Kinks, a song that could certainly serve as a household anthem for Lowery and Co., but hardly one which they could sing in a more defiant and aggres­sive manner than Dave Davies.
So, overall, this is essential for completists, and a few of the tracks from Mating Ovens are essential for best-of compilations; the stylistic world of Camper Van Beethoven is so large and diverse that even here you can still discover some sorely missing pieces of the whole puzzle. But, of course, odds-and-ends will always be odds-and-ends.
CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN (2000)
1) Broadcasting Live From The MCI; 2) L'Aguardiente; 3) Tom Flower's 1500 Valves; 4) All Her Favorite Fruit (orchestral version); 5) Closing Theme; 6) Loose Lips Sink Ships; 7) Who Are The Brain Police?; 8) Stayin' At Home With The Girls In The Morning; 9) Klondike; 10) S.P. 37957 Medley; 11) Balalaika Gap (demo); 12) The Perfect Enigma Machine; 13) We're All Wasted And We're Wasting All Your Time.
Leave it to Camper Van Beethoven to make an ideal mess out of a comeback-reunion album. After a decade of independent projects, such as Lowery's Cracker, Lowery, Krummenacher, and Segel come together to see if there's still any future left for the good old Camper — the proper test being the ability to produce a record of unpredictable, but controlled chaos and see if it holds water. (Spoiler: if it does hold water, it's probably not worth a damn. Who needs a Camper Van Beethoven that holds water, rather than spills it all on your pants?).
Many of the song titles here are recognizable from past records: in fact, upon first glance one might actually take this for a live album, but only a few tracks seem to come from actual live performances, with the others being an eclectic mix of old demo versions, outtakes, and some newly recorded material, all purportedly tangled together with the aim of not letting you properly distinguish between «vintage» CvB and «modern» CvB. Accordingly, I'm not even going to try to sort this out or focus on minor details, such as, for instance, ʽBalalaika Gapʼ being almost the same track as the original, only a little bit slower, or ʽWasting All Your Timeʼ being exactly the same track as it used to be on the Take The Skinheads Bowling EP, for some reason.
Of the new, or, at least, previously unheard material, some relative highlights are: (a) ʽS.P. 37957 Medleyʼ — a six-minute mash-up of Led Zeppelin's ʽDazed And Confusedʼ with ʽHava Nagilaʼ, because, I mean, what two songs in the world could be spiritually closer to each other?; (b) ʽL'Aguardienteʼ, a cool acoustic-and-violin instrumental (featuring Morgan Fichter and actually played live) that, technically, is also a mash-up, with Iberian flamenco motives seamlessly flowing into Balkan dance music and vice versa; (c) ʽKlondikeʼ, a long, morose, dreary country waltz with quite a bit of a Leonard Cohen vibe to it.
Curiously, all of these excellent tracks are quite lengthy, whereas shorter tracks tend to float by as relatively unnoticed, or relatively unimpressive — thus, there's really no point in Camper Van Beethoven covering Zappa's ʽWho Are The Brain Police?ʼ, an originally mega-weird track that could not be made any weirder by anybody; and brief instrumentals such as ʽClosing Themeʼ, an exercise «progressive blues-rock», are simply boring, because nobody in the band could play the guitar at the level of «guitar hero» anyway (incidentally, the song was at one time available under the tongue-in-cheek title of ʽGuitar Heroʼ). They still get by on the strength of diversity — almost every single track is in a genre of its own — so, ultimately, it's still fun, and the orchestrated version of ʽAll Her Favorite Fruitʼ even adds a bit of a baroque-pop flavor which, so far, has not been noticed on any CvB record at all.
Like Vantiquities, this is primarily a record for completists, but its release at the turn of the cen­tury may have been somewhat symbolic — a reminder that there will always be a place for a bit of post-modern surrealism in the new millennium as well, even as, with all these covers of Zappa and Led Zeppelin, it is obvious that Lowery & Co.'s primary influences are still firmly rooted in the past: be it a resurrection of old recordings or work on the new ones, there is no attempt to recognize any of the «progress» that the musical world went through in the Nineties, and you certainly won't find me complaining about this.
TUSK (2002)
1) Over And Over; 2) The Ledge; 3) Think About Me; 4) Save Me A Place; 5) Sara; 6) What Makes You Think You're The One; 7) Storms; 8) That's All For Everyone; 9) Not That Funny; 10) Sisters Of The Moon; 11) Angel; 12) That's Enough For Me; 13) Brown Eyes; 14) Never Make Me Cry; 15) I Know I'm Not Wrong; 16) Honey Hi; 17) Beautiful Child; 18) Walk A Thin Line; 19) Tusk; 20) Never Forget.
The liner notes to the album will inform you that the idea of covering Fleetwood Mac's Tusk in its entirety goes back to 1987, when the band recorded an original set of demo tapes but then decided to lay off the project. However, since no well-documented evidence exists for the fact, it is commonly assumed by the wise ones that this is just one of the many self-concocted myths around the band — and anyway, who cares? There is no doubt that Camper Van Beethoven, a band that lives in its own time frame, could have done this in 1987, in 1997, in 2017, heck, any place in time (would be a little hard to do it prior to 1979, but with these guys, nothing is ever completely impossible).
Anyway, while this particular move for the reassembled band was naturally unpredictable, it is not as totally «unnatural» as if they'd wanted to, say, come out with a bunch of Aphex Twin covers. Their penchant for surrealistically re-inventing old school material, from Floyd to Zep­pelin, was already well known; and when you think of it, there's quite a bit they have in common with Lindsey Buckingham — the inborn pop instincts, the diverse bag of influences ranging from pop to hard rock to folk / country / bluegrass, and the experimental drive that never allows these influences to drag the music down to the level of bland imitation. Even the choice of Tusk over all the other Fleetwood Mac albums is logical in a way — just as nobody expected an odd, chao­tic, experimental, and ultra-long record from Fleetwood Mac after Rumours, so did nobody expect the new CvB to cover all of it as their first «proper» new album in twelve years.
Of course, a post-modern take on an album that already had its share of post-modern moments in the first place is never going to make the annals in the status of a masterpiece. Understanding and even enjoying this new Tusk is hardly an autonomous task — it is useless to try and listen to it not only if you are unfamiliar with the original Tusk, but even if you are unfamiliar with Camper van Beethoven's classic period albums: it simply does not exist outside of its context. But even in context, it is not easy to understand what it is. It is not a «tribute» — many of the songs have been mutated almost beyond recognition — but neither is it a «parody», because they obviously love the source material, and besides, CvB were never a parody act. Mostly, it is about breaking as many rules as possible, and replacing them with one simple rule: Change The Vibe!
This rule is most evident when it comes to covering songs that were written and performed by Christine McVie (the starry-eyed sentimental ballads) and Stevie Nicks (the Ice Queen quasi-Goth doom-laden epics). With McVie, they go easy on the little moments of deep beauty (such as the desperate "could it really, really be..." melodic plunge on ʽOver And Overʼ), but take her to task hard on everything else — ʽThink About Meʼ is transformed into a pop-punk screamfest, ʽBrown Eyesʼ is made to sound like an industrialized Cabaret Voltaire number, ʽNever Make Me Cryʼ is now a lethargic psycho-folk dirge, ʽHoney Hiʼ is the product of a balalaika busker playing at a busy street intersection, and ʽNever Forgetʼ is turned into a lo-fi outtake from a fictional Neutral Milk Hotel recording session. In other words, we love your songs, Christine, but they could use some transplanting — it's just too boring when all of them are delivered in the same style. Don't you know that punk rockers, industrial grinders, street buskers, and batshit crazy indie kids have sentimental feelings, too?
With Stevie, it actually looks as if they don't like her songs all that much — most of them are as close as the album really comes to parody level. On ʽSaraʼ, they lay on so many sonic overdubs and so much echo on the vocals that it is clear — they are taking every precaution so as not to give the false impression that they are taking any of those lyrics seriously. ʽStormsʼ is dominated by a seriously out-of-tune violin track (we are verbally warned about this in the intro to the song) that makes it hard to focus on any other aspect of the song. The most hilarious surgery is being done on ʽSisters Of The Moonʼ, though, transformed into a synth-pop dirge with «robotic» female vocals delivering the lyrics in a thoroughly perfunctory and impassionate manner — in fact, towards the end of the song the «robot» actually breaks down and begins spouting broken bits from various quotations (ranging from "call me Ishmael" to "this one goes to eleven" to "fuck me harder"), implying that you probably wouldn't feel the difference anyway. I would sure love to learn Stevie's reaction to that one — there was a time when her performance of ʽSistersʼ took on quite a religious aspect on stage, but then, she always did have a sense of humor.
Working their magic over Buckingham's songs is a bit more difficult, considering how distinctly weird many of those were in the first place — and try as they might, they are not going to make songs like ʽThe Ledgeʼ or ʽI Know I'm Not Wrongʼ any weirder. All that's possible is to add a few more extravagant touches here and there — use some bagpipes on ʽI Know I'm Not Wrongʼ, some lazifying vocal distortion and a bit of trombone on ʽSave Me A Placeʼ, or insert a surrep­titious lyrical reference to the B-52's ʽRock Lobsterʼ in ʽNot That Funnyʼ (is this an implication that the B-52's were «not that funny» or what?). The only spot where they pull all the stops is the title track — here, gloriously extended to a whoppin' ten-minute length and made into something much bigger than the original; in fact, this is probably the only song here that would merit inclu­sion on any representative CvB anthology, as it turns into a bombastic psychedelic jam with a chaotic noise section (at times, calling to mind ʽRevolution #9ʼ rather than any Fleetwood Mac track) and an extended series of drony guitar solos, all tied together with the classic dance-style ʽTuskʼ bass line. If you ever thought that the original ʽTuskʼ fizzled out way too soon (and I know I did), this inter­pretation of it might be right up your alley.
So what would be the final judgement? I think that as an idea, this track-for-track cover of Tusk is a cool one — despite the inevitable flaws in the individual realizations of particular tracks. As a «meta-artistic» gesture rather than an actual platter of emotional entertainment, this is hardly an album that you will want to listen to more than once unless you have "I'm not like everybody else" engraved in chicken shit over your front door, but it is a stimulating gesture all the same, and it is fascinating to observe all the huge effort that went into it — plus, as an obsessive com­pletist, I actually find myself fascinated with the determination to cover every single song on a double album (when they could have easily stuck to just their favourite Buckingham tunes, for instance, not necessarily just from Tusk). So, a thumbs up it is, after all, but now, if you excuse me, I feel a craving for the original coming on, and so should you, probably.