Don Caballero - What Burns Never Comes Back

It's not easy to write about a band like Don Caballero. It's well known that Damon Che and co. represent a decidedly anomalous case in the history of independent rock. This holds true both on a strictly sonic level, given the unusual cocktail of prog and post-punk the four were synthesizing, and on a cultural level, namely the reserved yet theatrical attitude the band flaunted.

Don Caballero have always been over the top. Accused of making music that's too rigid and self-serious, accused of technicality for its own sake, and of having created a genre (math-rock, a paternity they never accepted) that many consider simply a poor copy of progressive rock.

Adding to the difficulty of writing an accurate feature that does justice to this ensemble is the recent revival of the band name orchestrated by Mr. Octopus (as the drummer/leader/despot was rightly dubbed in the booklet of their third album) starting in spring 2006, when World Class Listening Problem was released - a mediocre record by a band only a quarter related to the original.

Nonetheless, their original discography (spanning 1991-2000) marks an undeniable turning point in rock music. Their contribution was crucial to the birth of that dazed musical idiom known as post-rock, and, even more importantly, thanks to them "indie" rock was able to engage with more complex music that until then had been considered off-limits, such as progressive (which today seems to be regaining the dignity that punk had stripped from it for over 20 years) and jazz-rock.

But let's take it step by step.

Don Caballero formed in Pittsburgh in 1991; the initial line-up consisted of Mike Banfield on guitar, Pat Morris on bass and Damon Che Fitzgerald on drums. The band's sound was initially very dark and noisy, a kind of instrumental post-punk made up of rigorous guitar patterns, heavy basslines and precise, hard-hitting drumming. With this line-up the band recorded a handful of singles before one Ian Williams took over as second guitarist. With Williams things didn't change much, if anything the atmospheres grew even more abstract and heavy.

The debut album, titled For Respect, came out in 1993, and you immediately get the sense of being in the presence of a band with something extra compared to the average act. The eleven tracks on the album are as staggering as anything heard since "Spiderland". Abstract, powerful music, akin to the idiom of Slint, from whom it had inherited an experimental attitude and a tendency to stretch songs out from dissonant riffs and chords, combined with the most evolved and thunderous strain of hardcore.

Produced by Steve Albini, who as usual brings out the raw, powerful side of the sound, For Respect is a remarkably lucid work in its overall structure, even though the tracks are convulsive, oppressive and undoubtedly a tough listen.

Tracks like "For Respect" and "Rocco" push the white noise of Big Black, Helmet and Unsane to its extreme consequences, updating it with a hefty dose of obsessive, jagged dissonance. The absence of vocals makes the end result even more traumatic, an insurmountable wall of decibels, acid-etched guitars and pachydermal drumming. The tracks alternate slow, extreme heaviness with abrupt shifts in perspective, fragmented tempos giving way to martial, off-beat cadences. In total, over half an hour of carnage that's hard to take in all at once.

For Respect is a harrowing, dark record, sophisticated in its own way, but decidedly out of reach for avant-garde lovers, and too abstract for indie-rockers. At a time when the "alternative nation" had not yet turned into a money-making machine and the word post-rock still meant nothing (Slint, known at the time to just a few hundred people, had only just broken up), one can imagine that rock audiences didn't exactly jump for joy finding themselves holding music like that contained on For Respect.

Nevertheless, the band carries on along its natural path, delivering the follow-up two years later.

Don Caballero 2 comes out in 1995, an ambitious and monumental record, starting with its running time, which comfortably exceeds sixty minutes. In the two years that had passed, something had changed: the music is no longer the monolithic sound of their debut but has become more agile and nervy. Williams seems to have taken the reins of the band, once at the mercy of Che alone, and the result is, if anything, even more jarring than before. The line-up has undergone a further change, with Mike Jencik replacing Morris on bass (his presence, like that of every bassist in the band, will prove transitory).

It opens with "Stupid Puma", irregular, stuttering rhythmic patterns, violent noise outbursts, controlled chaos, a maniacal command of the instruments — in a word: perfect. The shift from the obsessions of the previous album is sharp and unmistakable. It continues with "Please Tokio, please THIS IS Tokio", a sensational example of avant-garde rock in which Robert Fripp's guitar work, Bill Cobham's rhythmic geometries, and the most evolved kind of noise all coexist. The ending is memorable, dragging clangor and feedback to within a stone's throw of the experiments of Lee Ranaldo and Glenn Branca.

There's no shortage of more direct, enjoyable moments either, like "Rollerblade Success Story", where the atmosphere becomes more intelligible and colorful.

"2", however, will go down in history as the most powerful rock record ever played. The sonic blueprints laid out by King Crimson are driven definitively to the point of collapse, the groove is completely disjointed and hysterical, and the shape of the tracks becomes chaotic and uncontrolled.

Damon Che's drumming is by now a kind of long, frenzied jazz/grind solo. The drummer has honed an utterly personal style, in which the tightness and power of noise-rock meet the improvisational, destructured spirit of avant-garde jazz. Williams, for his part, holds his own admirably, his superb technique letting him range effortlessly from rarefied, psychedelic patterns to violent, heavy-leaning outbursts.

There's no intellectual posturing on this record, just sweat and rock'n'roll. This is probably the defining trait of Don Cab. Unlike ensembles such as King Crimson and Blind Idiot God, where the progressive and epic component is placed front and center, here traumatic abstraction and non-linear convulsions are the backbone of the sound. Even the math-rock element, which is present in marked form, gets buried under Che's violent, clattering drumming and the horrible, cerebral trajectories of the guitars.

The 8 songs on Don Caballero 2 represent an important sonic document, a violent, hyperkinetic rock that can suddenly, as if by magic, turn into melody, into rarefied, enchanting landscapes of harmonics and dreamy arpeggios. An excellent example of this ability is the already-mentioned "Please Tokio", which starts with a destructured, thread-thin groove before flowing into a magnificent weave of light, brilliant guitars. A few seconds, and then power again, pyrotechnic guitars, acrobatic drumming, a perfect machine, a lucidly orchestrated interlocking puzzle, a sonic flow unmatched in power and formal perfection.

No metal band manages to be this powerful, no avant-garde ensemble reaches the expressive heights of Don, no prog band is as effective and austere.

Don's music is a visual one, to be followed with the eyes more than with the ears. A music that takes shape and substance right in front of the listener and projects them into a new dimension, magnetically fascinating, morbidly attractive. The feeling that best captures the band's music is vertigo, the loss of bearings, the suspension of gravity itself.

Don Caballero 2 will mark a point of no return for rock, but also for the band itself, which, starting with the following What Burns Never Returns (1998), decides to change direction radically.

Meanwhile Williams founds Storm & Stress, who in 1997 debut with a devastating album (recorded by Steve Albini) built on avant-garde jazz and skewed songwriting. Damon Che, too, reinvents himself as an eccentric singer-songwriter with The(e) Speaking Canaries. Both ventures are interesting and enjoyable, yet these divertissements seem to foreshadow the leadership struggles Don Cab would soon find themselves facing.

Both Damon Che and Ian Williams are exceptional musicians with strong personalities, and the two of them would clash more and more often until the band's breakup, announced towards the end of 2000 following an ill-fated tour.

1998 is a rather lucky year for the Pittsburgh band: with post-rock in full bloom, the quartet has no trouble getting noticed. On the other hand, What Burns Never Returns is widely regarded as their best record. Pat Morris, ousted a few years earlier, retakes his place as bassist, even though the band's overall attitude has by now irreversibly changed.

The Storm & Stress experience has shifted the compositional axis towards more melodic and improvised territory. The guitarist's main points of reference are now second-era Robert Fripp (the "Discipline" era, to be precise) and Derek Bailey, the legendary guitarist of the avant-garde impro scene.

The manic distortion is by now a faded memory that only resurfaces on the frantic "Delivering The Groceries At 138 Beat Per Minute", where the monstrous power of the first two records is gloriously evoked once more. Elsewhere the album settles into free registers, despite the unchanged percussive drive of Damon Che, who keeps assaulting the listener with his now instantly recognizable style.

Williams discovers the use of delay and starts experimenting with twisted tapping guitar lines that chip away at the rigid rhythmic structure imposed by the drummer. The guitars are constantly off the beat, deliberately non-metric, forming a kind of blanket that wraps around the sonic flow, making it seem disjointed. Seemingly so, because the mathematical logic hasn't actually disappeared: it has simply turned into a subtle game of tone and melody, delicate fractal micro-interactions subjected to endless variations on a theme.

The melodies, however, remain atonal and jagged, percussive and graceless, while the rhythmic geometries grow ever more treacherous and rarefied; tracks like "June Is Finally Here" and "From The Desk Of Elsewhere Go" closely recall the experiments of musicians like Art Ensemble Of Chicago.

If Don Caballero 2 represents the band's peak in terms of power and skill (not just technical skill, it's worth stressing), What Burns… introduces radically new elements. The opener "Don Caballero 3" (which starts with the same pattern that closed the previous album) lingers on atonal guitar movements and disjointed drumming, offering a virtually infinite spectrum of possibilities, where improvisation, groove and mathematics merge into synesthesia, color, vision.

Fragmented, disorganic arpeggios capable of creating an emotional tangle of disarming richness. Williams' guitar (not forgetting Bandfield, who offers excellent contrapuntal ideas) weaves surreal, seductive melodies that paint enchanted landscapes, radiant yet melancholic atmospheres, never trite or saccharine, always modern, fractured and "free", able to get under your skin and stick in your memory just like the catchiest pop hooks.

What Burns… is yet another excellent Don Caballero record, and although less revolutionary than its predecessor, it cements the band's status as one of the most important musical forces of the late century.

1999 brings the release of the compilation Singles Breaking Up vol.1, an anthology of all the singles released by the group. Interest in Don Caballero keeps growing, and the record, genuinely lovely in its own right, serves to keep the spotlight firmly on the band.

Singles Breaking Up vol.1 is nonetheless not a record for fans only, but objectively a fine collection of tracks, most of them previously unreleased, that naturally and thoroughly traces the evolutionary path the band followed over the years. For this writer, it's even more interesting than their debut album, which, years on, is admittedly hard to put back on the turntable (perhaps due to a boxed-in, overly claustrophobic production). One possible shortcoming is the total absence of material from 1994/1995, the period when Don Caballero released their second album and nothing else (at least as far as the record shows). More recent tracks are well represented too, such as "Room Temperature Lounge" (an alternative take of "Room Temperature Suite", included on What Burns…) and "Trey Dog's Acid", both superb.

After putting out three albums in seven years of activity, Don Caballero almost seem intent on oversaturating their own image, releasing in 2000 American Don, their third album in three years.

American Don (whose title riffs on the films "American Beauty" and "American Pie") is a less mathematical, more classically rock record. Still a fine effort overall, on which the band attempts to steer towards more rhythmically regular territory and more restrained sonic solutions. Another lineup change: Bandfield and Morris are permanently let go, while Eric Emm (already of Storm & Stress) takes over on bass.

American Don is the record that seems to want to declare math-rock clinically dead: no more convoluted rhythms or sonic fury — times have changed, and it's better to try charting new paths.

Indeed, compositions like "I Never Liked You" and "Haven't Lived Afro Pop" seem diametrically opposed to the dissonant cataclysms of For Respect. The guitar tangle, still markedly Frippian, has become steady and pulsing — at times it sounds like listening to Tortoise — and even the more turbulent moments (the magnificent "You Drink A Lot Of Coffee For A Teenager" and "Let's Face It Pal You Didn't Need That Eye Surgery") are nonetheless light years away from the destructive violence of old.

American Don represents the band's definitive break from "math" aesthetics, an enjoyable, atmospheric record that clarifies once and for all (if there was ever any doubt) the stature and expressive abilities of the band, whose sound, however complicated, drew its strength from the ability to conjure vertiginous landscapes rather than from any display of technical prowess.

But toward the autumn of that same year, something in the band's balance broke down: the US tour ended up exposing a kind of widespread unease among the members, who went through all sorts of upheaval, including a furious argument and a violent car accident they miraculously walked away from unscathed.

The members survived, but the band didn't: it broke up by the end of the year.

A short time later, following some unfortunate professional setbacks, Damon Che realized that the name Don Caballero was still a good way to make some money. The talented drummer had previously tried his hand at the Bellini experience with Giovanna Cacciola and Agostino Tilotta (both of Uzeda), but his irritable temperament had led him to abandon the band quite literally, leaving them stranded in Atlanta before a show and driving off with the van. Around the same time, Williams founded Battles, who would soon break through with the album "Mirrored".

In stark contrast to what was declared by the programmatically titled What Burns Never Returns, Don Caballero reformed in 2003 with a line-up in which the only surviving member was monsieur Fitzgerald. Having signed to Relapse, the new math-rockers churned out two albums, thin on ideas and substance: the aforementioned World Class Listening Problem (2006) and Punkgasm (2008).

But what burns never returns, and the Don (the real ones) are no exception. Many have wondered whether it would have been better to let this creature, which had given so much, rest in peace, rather than irreparably tarnish its legacy. But, as we know, everyone's got to make a living...

P.S. The albums from the post-2000 reunion have been deliberately left out. The goal of this feature is to trace the key moments of the original band's first period of activity, which has little to do with the heavy-leaning direction pursued by Damon Che alone on the two subsequent albums.

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