Butane Variations – (Self-Titled) (Achord Recordings)
Much of Butane Variations’ self-titled LP is laudable, proficient at least. It has its rockets and gems and also its sparklers and zircon. Opener “Skyward, Upward,” for example, is well crafted and executed but, to borrow from Seymour Glass, it does not “Keep me out till five only because all [its] stars are out, and for no other reason.” In its defense the song does close with a surprise, a swift Abbey Road-like transition. The push towards this sort of adventurism in the song structure achieves the LP’s grandest moments. One such moment is “Big Belly Laugh” and its triumphant closing processional, which continually prompts me to wonder afterwards, “Why isn’t it all this magical?”
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Twenty-five years after their debut release, the Meat Puppets have the dexterity and awareness, still, to absorb their surroundings (desert, television, the U.S. and it’s indigenous population) and funnel them back out as distinctly and confusingly palatable. Rise To Your Knees is a continuation of the thick sound the Puppets have been honing since 1995’s No Joke!: dark electric guitars chomping and chugging beneath wild and wily solos and subtle melodic tensions.
If the Handsome Furs grew up in my neighborhood I did not see them nor did they see me, staying inside as we did to learn guitar chords and read books, especially on sunny days, when the, to quote Tennessee Williams by way of Gore Vidal, “the superfluous people are off the street.” Their first LP, Plague Park, stirs a longing to change residences and then move back again. Its sound is not urban nor rural though evokes both, employing percussive exactness (loud and processed) in the former and the latter in the distorted guitars and one note at a time keyboards of the stargazing ambler. It is not the old place or the one you are moving to, it is the roadway between.
Arrah, taking stage with the Ferns and hailing from Muncie, Indiana, thanked the bountiful Monday night Bug Jar audience for staying around to the last band. As it was only 10:30pm we couldn’t consider ourselves flattered, but the band’s stomping and melodically hectic set was worth whatever wait we were complimented for.