Ian Svenonius - Sassiest boy in America

I want to disturb America
(Emanuel Carnevali)

A recurring archetypal icon in the history of rock is that of the prankster. The term, badly translated into Italian as “burlone” and made famous by the followers of Ken Kesey immortalized in a cult book by the recently deceased Tom Wolfe (the notorious Merry Pranksters who roamed the States in a van decorated with psychedelic patterns, equipped with enough LSD to fuel an atomic apocalypse), designates a specific political and existential attitude, devoted to all-out provocation carried out in sharply sarcastic and theatrical terms. The late 60s were, unsurprisingly, the golden age for these figures, as bizarre as they were destabilizing: Fugs, Country Joe, David Peel, Mick Farren, Edgar Broughton, to name just the most prominent. These are figures who constitute a species of their own, quite different both from the “committed” author (whose primary aim isn't to denounce some wrong or injustice, but to cause disturbance in the most conspicuous way possible) and from the “freak” (to whose noisy individualism they oppose an energetic, if over-the-top, libertarian conscience).
It's no coincidence that punk, and later hardcore, plundered this glorious legacy wholesale: Jello Biafra, Dave Dictor, Randy “Biscuit” Turner, Gary Floyd are just a few of the many pestering showmen who terrorized capitalist Western society with their irreverent stunts. Proliferating without restraint in states as porous to iconoclastic madness as California and Texas, these cheeky punks had less luck on the opposite coast, generally marked by more serious, intellectualized stances, less inclined to acid-tongued vaudeville. A striking exception, though, is a funny fellow who, far from the spotlight of both the mainstream and even the most celebrated counterculture, has spent the last thirty years dispensing lessons in ethical and aesthetic consistency with his irresistibly punchable face: Ian Svenonius.

Nation Of Ulysses

The N.O.U. is probably the most important development to beset music since electrification, as they were the first to articulate intent through written manifestos and stage histrionics, refuting rock'n'roll's traditional policy of posturing rebelliously while aping parent culture values
(Nation Of Ulysses presentation on the Dischord website)

Born in Chicago in a prophetic 1968, Svenonius came of age in the late 80s within Washington D.C.'s politicized scene, absorbing its livid rage and strong experimental drive. His idea of activism, however, diverges sharply from that of his fellow citizens: while the content of his proclamations often verges on an oblique orthodoxy blending Frankfurt School-style Marxism, Situationism, anarchist splinters and fragments of historical avant-gardes, the form in which they are delivered recalls more the grotesque skits of Pere Ubu or the apocalyptic sermons of Birthday Party. A frenzied little theatre in which everything is pushed to extremes in a hysterical, but not psychotic, manner, without ever losing sight of the lucid subversive aims that inspire it. The hallmark of his art is parody, but understood in a visceral and violent sense: for him, appropriating other people's languages means penetrating them to the point of disembowelment, turning them into shapeless masses of electrified nerves. His modus operandi at times recalls that of a child, or an inmate in an asylum, who, trying to imitate the gestures of “grown-up” and “normal” people, deforms them in a clumsy and slightly unsettling way.

Even when he seems to take himself seriously, he does so in such an exaggerated way that he sabotages himself, almost as if he wanted to expose in advance the contradictions inherent in such an extreme rhetoric. As cultured as he is anti-intellectual, his approach combines a sophisticated Red Brigades-style imagery with a wild attitude that ties back to the roughest musical forms, from Detroit rock to free jazz. What he carries out is a systematic refusal: of the culture industry, of censorship, of consumer music, of classic rock, and of punk itself, even as he borrows from the latter the energy and nihilism expressed through a hyperkinetic, at times self-destructive, physicality.
His voice takes care of the rest, a hoarse bark like a beast sent to slaughter, as crude as the shouts of a street politician yet as precise as a sniper's aim.

On these premises, in 1988 he put together Steve Kroner on guitar, Steve Gamboa on bass and James Canty (brother of Brendan from Fugazi) on drums, who started their musical venture as Ulysses; the following year Tom Green joined on second guitar and the lineup settled under the name Nation Of Ulysses. Besides singing, Svenonius blows into a trumpet with the same fervor with which James Chance manhandles his sax. More than a traditional band, this was a genuine subversive collective, even “a political party” according to Svenonius's own hyperbolic lexicon, carefully devised to destabilize the artistic and social establishment by “manufacturing weapons instead of recording albums.”
As with all operations driven more by the head than the gut, the first step was to adopt a non-negotiable statute, including a uniform (all members had to dress elegantly, both to snub the crudeness of classic rockers and to mock the fashion obsession that gripped both punk and new wave), a revolutionary code of conduct (no drug use, placing them in the vicinity of contemporary straight edge bands but mainly aiming to reject the excesses of the 70s), and an accessory symbolic apparatus (the elaborate liner notes of their albums, which they themselves defined as nothing less than “propaganda,” acting as a counter-information outlet).

To amplify the message even further, the band (whose members lived together in a kibbutz-like house nicknamed “The Embassy”) went as far as printing a periodic bulletin, “Ulysses Speaks,” distributed at shows or by mail, in which they theorized their very own “Ulysses Aesthetic” and tried to intimidate the system by claiming nonexistent terrorist activities. They had two sworn enemies: the “rock'n'roll monolith,” which had corrupted and sold off every shred of content authenticity, and the consumer society that uses it as a commodified and commodifying vehicle. To them rock is merely a disguise for reaching the masses, the goal being to create “a space of freedom where anything can happen.”
Where Gang Of Four proposed an anti-entertainment to counter state-sanctioned muzak, Nation Of Ulysses rambled on about an independent commune aiming for secession from the United States, “an underground nation for a dispossessed youth colony,” whose highly hypothetical followers could be no older than 18 and had to abide by thoroughly surreal rules (the most famous being the obligation to consume massive quantities of sugar and caffeine every day).

The music, in step with all this, could only embrace the most radical and elusive instincts, merging the nihilistic primitivism of Pop Group, the unscrupulous contaminations of No Wave, the free-core of Saccharine Trust, and an abrasive instrumental naïveté reminiscent of British anarcho-punk (none of the five had much familiarity with their instruments: “All you need is concept,” the leader was fond of recommending).
The propulsion engine was their restless average age of about twenty, the seatbelt an acid irony that defused any possible naivety. The group quickly built a solid reputation thanks to their extremely intense live shows, terrifying bacchanals in which Svenonius spared nothing, neither himself (on several occasions he would end up with broken limbs or a split head) nor the audience (there are several recorded cases of injuries at their shows), with the unmistakable Washington flag always looming behind them like a sly vulture.
Before recording a single note, young Ian was already a minor legend. The teen magazine “Sassy Magazine,” after interviewing him, crowned him “sassiest boy in America,” a title that would follow him for the rest of his career. The buzz building around the band caught the attention of the legendary Dischord, Ian MacKaye's label and symbol of the local scene, who promptly signed them, presenting them as “a violent separatist political party and terrorist group operating out of Washington, D.C.”

Their recording debut came in 1990 with a self-titled single containing three tracks: “The Sound Of Young America” opens with an Ayler-esque saxophone upheaval before turning into one of the most disjointed and furious punk assaults ever recorded, with two guitars chasing each other breathlessly in a reckless racket that would make Crass envious. “Channel One Ulysses” grafts a caricature-like military band trumpet onto the sickly sound of Flipper. “Atom Bomb” picks up the screaming hardcore of Rites Of Spring and Squirrel Bait, shifting the compass needle from the personal to the public, before being swept away by one last blast of sax. Possible comparisons for this brazenly graceless music could be The Fall with half the melody, or Pussy Galore with double the violence, but every time the equation seems to click, the frontman's congested yelps come along to shuffle the deck. While the band would soon prove capable of far greater savagery, this record is already a thoroughly effective testimony to their reckless intentions.

Their full-length debut arrived the following year with 13-Point Program To Destroy America which, starting with the title (a schizophrenic mashup of the Black Panthers' “ten-point program” and “Red China's Secret Plan to Destroy America,” the paranoid anti-communist pamphlet penned by J. Edgar Hoover), makes clear the scope of their sedition. Powered by explosive anthems such as “Spectra Sonic Sound,” “Tonight I Met The Girl I'm Going To Marry,” “Cool Senior High School (Fight Song)” and “You're My Miss Washington, D.C.,” the album is a hail of 13 short Molotov cocktails that allow not a moment's respite, updating the lesson of MC5 through hardcore's supersonic fury.
More compact and controlled than their first unhinged wail (which was later bundled with it on the CD reissue), it still contains no small share of deranged flare-ups (the Grant Hart-fronted Cows of “Ulythium,” the jazzed-up Black Flag of “Diptheria,” the atonal obsession of Mx-80 Sound on “Aspirin Kid”). Where the song lyrics end, the unhinged liner notes begin, in which, picking up the legacy of '68-era prophets like Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Vaneigem, they declare they are “targeting the structures of everyday life such as aesthetics, sound, and the unspoken things that are inherently political, rather than the glossy superficial aspects that inept politicians focus on, who prevent any revolutionary change,” but also that “dressing well and fashionably is the only thing we kids can still exert any control over, having been deprived of everything else.”

A few months later another three-track single was unleashed, “The Birth Of The Ulysses Aesthetic (The Synthesis Of Speed And Transformation)” which, translating the title's statement to the letter, pushed their ambitions much further and laid the groundwork for what would soon become THE NOU sound, flirting explicitly with jazz and embracing even more frayed solutions: “The Sound Of Jazz To Come” steals its title from Ornette Coleman and opens with a statement read over John Coltrane's “Acknowledgement,” before setting off a cluster explosion in which Svenonius shreds his vocal cords. Even more harrowing is “N.O.U.S.P.T.D.A.,” an extremely slow spontaneous combustion conducted with the relentlessness of Scratch Acid, containing one of their most famous slogans (“Destroying America is not easy/ You got to look it in the eye”). “Presidents Of Vice” pairs the Stooges' brazenness with turgid metallic blasts, before dissolving into something else, by now prey to an out-of-control frenzy.

In such a short span of time, the five-piece's music had undergone a sudden acceleration toward organized chaos, as if it had been definitively infected by the very fervor that inspired it. Around this same period an episode occurred that fans still hold dear: shortly before a show in Memphis alongside Bikini Kill, the band realized the event's promoter hadn't done his job properly and decided to canvass the city handing out flyers to try and fix things. While flyering, they ran into Primal Scream, who were in town recording “Give Out But Don't Give Up.” The Scottish band showed up at the gig that evening and invited them to join them in the studio the next day to record something: the result was four tracks that went down in history as the “Memphis Demos,” which, suitably reworked, would form the backbone of their second and final LP.

Plays Pretty For Babies, produced by Ian MacKaye like its predecessor, came out in the fall of 1992. Judging from the photo and the cover artwork, you'd think you were looking at a garage combo stuck in the wrong decade, but the 60s being referenced here are really the Dadaist ones of Captain Beefheart and Red Crayola, albeit in a version heavily pumped full of steroids. What strikes you isn't so much the violence as the spasmodic urgency that engulfs everything like a tsunami of blood and sweat, finally breaking the locks off a music that was already hardly tameable in terms of freedom and energy.
The result is an animalistic frenzy wrung out to scorching levels, distantly related to the barbaric midwestern noise of Laughing Hyenas or to the filthy depravity of Butthole Surfers and Fear: the difference is that Ian & co. put this infernal sound at the service of their circus-like agit prop rather than of nihilism for its own sake, turning it into a devastating vehicle for a relentless guerrilla warfare with few precedents and even fewer successors.
This time the target is the family, and the album presents itself as “a blueprint for the destruction of parental culture, an instruction manual with which kids can demolish their domestic lives,” written in the splattered ink of a liberator who finds himself in the same conditions as the prisoner. The effect is that of a berserk pogo where you're constantly shoved left and right, a fragmented, blunt-force fresco just like the images evoked in the lyrics: frantic scenes shot on broken-down handheld cameras, swarming with toxic female figures adrift, sung with the pathos of someone who would suffocate if he didn't scream.

Introduced by a live reading from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” over ominous, premonitory feedback, “N-Sub Ulysses” is NOU's definitive anthem, opening with “I’m not talking about a Beatles song/ Written a hundred years before I was born/ They’re all talking about the round and round/ But who’s got the real anti-parent culture sound?”, somewhere between a Cultural Revolution tazebao and an Abbie Hoffman speech, driven by the hoarse refrain “I got a feeling, yeah yeah yeah” bellowed at full volume with a throat on fire, squeezed between the Nuremberg iron maiden of the two guitars and the fanfare flourishes of the trumpet. “A Comment On Ritual” is a tornado that uproots trees and flattens houses before crashing into the atomic countdown of “The Hickey Underworld,” perfectly captured by the image “hysteria comin' out of her stereo,” with the unequivocal line “Action – don't you want some?” growled with such psychotically grating force it practically begs for a straitjacket. The melodramatic hardcore of “Perpetual Motion Machine” lives up to its premise over two and a half minutes of restless epilepsy, the polar opposite of the thoroughly lazy “N.O.U. Future-Vision Hypothesis,” a hazy instrumental bossa that, predictably, reveals very little about the “future-vision hypothesis” of these none-too-sane political analysts.

If every break in “50,000 Watts Of Goodwill” is a stab from a rusty knife that transmits incurable diseases, “Maniac Dragstrip” is a smart missile piloted through an alternation of accelerations and decelerations fit to tear your neurons apart with exasperation, with yet another explicit taking of sides such as “We don't go to their parties, yeah because they're the enemy/ We don't go to their parties, yeah because we hate them!”. The busy phone line of “Last Train To Cool” is the laconic signal of a longed-for answer that will never arrive, its anguish echoing in a hammering post-punk cannonade. “Shakedown” is no less effective, a “mission by invitation” in which the band runs wild, shedding pieces along the way until they disintegrate, opened by distant screams that evoke unnameable horrors before being silenced by a machine-gun burst.
“Mockingbird, Yeah!” foreshadows the crooked gospel leanings that will be given increasing room in Svenonius's future music, an alienating duet between a vibrant lead voice and lifeless, apathetic female backing vocals, as if the most willing of revolutionaries were leading a brigade of zombies. “Depression III” describes the disorder in question better than any psychiatric diagnosis, a soul melody complete with sax and vibraphone, drained of power by hazy guitar chords and muffled by a mid-range equalization that hurls every remaining ounce of energy into a place that's within reach but agonizingly unattainable.
The return to reality with the martial snare of “S.S. Exploder” is an abrupt cold shower, a meat grinder gone mad that can be switched on but never off, spraying lacerating questions in every direction (“what's this mean for the kids in America?”). The final onslaught of “The Kingdom Of Heaven Must Be Taken By Storm” delivers the decisive blow to bring down the last standing wall, with nonsense interjections of organ and flute and an epic rallying cry from a ringleader of the last: “Boys and girls gather round, c'mon everybody and dig this sound!”. Once again, the CD edition also folds in the previous EP.

Rarely has music written by the very young for other very young people managed to capture so effectively the hunger for life of adolescence, while at the same time coming across as a thoroughly adult and self-aware act of accusation and rebellion. With this absolute masterpiece, among the most astonishing albums of the decade, Nation Of Ulysses seal the sacred triad of post-hardcore alongside Fugazi and Naked Raygun, while also establishing themselves as a decisive beacon for the second wave of emocore that would soon sweep through the alternative world. A fairly curious fate: the band that stirred up armed insurrection risks becoming the bedroom poster of countless apolitically self-absorbed teenagers, in the most classic of post-ideological clichés.

Unfortunately, NOU end up being consumed by this blinding, unrepeatable flare-up. At the end of the recording, Steve Kroner leaves the band due to the birth of his first child, proving the accuracy of their own repeatedly stated anti-family theses. The surviving quartet sets to work on a hypothetical third album that, however, will never see the light of day (the material recorded during this period will be released in 2000 under the title The Embassy Tapes). By now adrift, the group decides to split up at the end of 1992.
Tim Green moves to San Francisco, reinventing himself as a sound engineer and playing with the math-rock band Fucking Champs. The survivors record a four-track EP titled Join Our Club under the makeshift name Cupid Car Club, falling into a more conventional punk-garage mold, mainly useful for laying the groundwork for the next, thrilling chapter of their career.
From here on, Our Man's attitude toward rock classicism will flip: from outright rejection without second thoughts, it shifts to an ironic reclamation for anti-commercial purposes, as if the unmistakably demodé nature of certain musical forms ended up embodying a clean-cut refusal of capitalism's exhausting obstacle course.

To this day, it remains a debated question how much of the grotesque theater of Nation Of Ulysses was staged and how much was ideologically genuine. For his part, Svenonius, true to his capricious character, has never done anything to dispel the enigma. Perhaps the most credible epitaph was written by the band themselves, between the lines of “The Sound Of Jazz To Come”: “There is only one Nation of Ulysses: the seriously unserious, reverently irreverent, amoral moralists whose iconoclastic assault on the received pieties of America place them in the front ranks of social critics (…) They were, as has been said, ‘The last group who knew everything' – and if they did not know quite everything they could distract your attention from the gap by a wry witticism (…) They refused to be patronized or dismissed, turned into a cult or giggled at. The important thing was to build a social analysis that would encompass modern culture and make humankind reckon with it”.

Years later, Ian would explain the end of Nation Of Ulysses and Cupid Car Club by pointing to a radical shift in direction for underground music, following the rise of digital music and the explosion of the "alternative nation" fueled by the success of Nirvana: "We found ourselves, against our will, projected into a different reality, facing a kind of empty, meaningless simulacrum now known as indie-rock. The need for a reaction became clear, and we acted on it by giving birth to Make-Up".

Make-Up

The new group comes to life at the start of 1995 out of the ashes of its predecessors, featuring, alongside the frontman, Canty and Gamboa – in their new roles as guitarist and drummer respectively – with the addition of bass and backing vocals from Michelle Mae, already a member of a couple of the countless punk-rock bands of the Olympia scene, Frumpies and Witchypoo.
The great stroke of insight from provocateur Svenonius, this time around, lies in the cunning blend of garage-soul and a kind of evangelical Marxism, a socialist theology of liberation, giving shape to a new self-proclaimed subgenre, as crowd-pleasing as it is original, christened gospel yeh-yeh in open opposition to the macho, bourgeois, capitalist paradigm of rock'n'roll or pop music: among its guiding principles are not only the well-known Situationist leanings, the unifying (and anti-individualist) ideological quirk of wearing matching uniforms on stage, and a renewed hostility toward the cultural industry of the "Yankee empire", but also the urgency of redeeming their audience from worn-out, ritualized formalism, emphatically elevating them to the status of "fifth official member", encouraging through the practical gospel format their more active participation, and working to tear down the so-called fourth wall through the leader-preacher's transgressive physical incursions on stage. Also illuminating is the expressive manifesto laid out at this stage in interviews, where he speaks of rhythm-based music, with a single guitar scaled back and kept in the same key as the voice: "We don't want those things to compete. We want to make a gospel, oratorical, sermon-based, ad-libbed form of music".

His very first appearance, curiously, comes in a 1994 independent film, "Half-Cocked", starring Rodan bassist Tara Jane O'Neil. The recorded debut, on the other hand, comes a little later with the seven-inch "Blue Is Beautiful", released on Black Gemini in the spring of 1995, followed in quick succession by split singles with Meta-Matics and Slant 6. It's only at the end of April the following year that Dischord puts out the debut album, Destination Love: Live! At Cold Rice, recorded in the studio by friend Guy Picciotto but presented under the fake guise of a live recording, in the spirit of similar Sixties record productions.

After the fake live introduction framing the record, evidently programmatic given its references to the elusive Gospel yeh-yeh sound, the ritual kicks off with the dusty, evocative blaze of "Here Comes The Judge". Ian is the same electrified punk performer from Nation Of Ulysses, though he's starting to polish his showman's nature, refining it into a sharp, just-right hysterical routine, still smeared with post-hardcore residue but carrying within it the seed of a new, more refined melodicism: less raw abrasion, in other words, and fewer political superstructures, in favor of a more openly revivalist outlook marked by substantial disengagement. The ringleader pours himself into a series of spoken-word fragments to introduce the songs to his nonexistent audience, and with the treacherous mantra of "You And I Vs The World" he skillfully lulls the game into a wary atmosphere (despite Gamboa's martial drumming), before unleashing the ham that lives within him amid hoarse barks, languid flirtations and electric convulsions reminiscent of the past. The album thus takes shape as a collection of nimble, sleek tracks, quickies sometimes surly, more often mischievous, invariably thrilling as they cross primal rock, deranged soul, blues, r'n'b and garage-punk.

Even the more relaxed passages reveal an uncommon explosive potential, particularly the fabulous "Don't Mind The Mind", emblematic with its softness and its filthy falsetto (a formula later often echoed by admirer King Khan) of the new line marked by frivolity, and the even more flirtatious "Bring The Birds Down" and "International Airport", staged call and response numbers, heavily ritualized, that push the Mick Jagger-style clichés to the max only to transfigure those poses into new incendiary farces. It's no coincidence that the most representative Make-Up remains the rough, possessed version that sets episodes like "Evidence Is Everywhere" ablaze with their irresistible garage verve: Svenonius already comes across as the high priest he will gradually turn into, a polemicist and crackpot engaged in a delightful secular liturgy, less a deranged anarchist splinter and more an eccentric entertainer.
Propelled by a churchy organ as well as the vigorous, feverish delivery of a frontman as histrionic as he is visceral, the gospel dimension takes flight in "We Can't Be Contained" and above all in the manifesto that is "R U A Believer" – the stuff of mystical trance – which lay out on stage the band's own personal "theology of liberation" (as the second side is titled) while the leader's voice tears itself ever more into a ragged wail.
But what makes it all so believable is that formidable vintage rock'n'roll costume that finds in "They Live By Night" or "Don't Step On The Children" gems fully representative of the lounging, infectious, mischievous style of a band already unique, thanks in part to Michelle Mae's sensual counter-vocals.

Recording activity picks up over the following year. Besides being at the center of James Schneider's docu-fiction "Blue Is Beautiful", in 1997 the band actually releases two albums in February, within the span of just four days, along with the seven-inch "Free Arthur Lee", campaigning for the release from prison of the Love singer, who had been arrested a few months earlier. Love themselves are the subject of an affectionate homage on the cover of Sound Verite, the first of the two LPs mentioned, which explicitly references that of "Forever Changes".

The live-in-the-room feel is rather frantic on a record that opens with a stripped-down boogie ("If They Come In The Morning") made lively by a Svenonius on the verge of neurosis, between torn high notes, womanly inflections and freakish falsettos. The atmosphere, in any case, comes across as thoroughly loose, almost beatific, keeping in check the heat and madness the band is instead able to deliver with precision on stage. Marvelously direct, concrete and obsessive, Make-Up don't betray their predilection for a sharp, nervy rock'n'roll (aided by the production of ex-Beat Happening member Calvin Johnson), while still managing to push past it with evidently well-crafted expressive hybrids. The explicit nod to a specific musical mythology in "Gospel 2000" partly brings back the branded fervor of the debut, of which it sets out to define an all too provocative continuation through simulated bouts of lovemaking.

The two segments titled "Gold Record" thus dust off the character of the hoarse, sly antihero, a prophet who rants exclusively about musical or aesthetic concerns and doesn't worry about coming across as overly tame in his futile yet irresistible invectives. Far more intriguing and abrasive is "Make-Up Is Lies", a compact, "domesticated" version of the incendiary Nation Of Ulysses: the frontman holds nothing back of his furious showmanship, and the same goes for the even more venomous "At The Tone, The Time Will Be".
While the overall tone of playful divertissement takes over again in the ironic instrumental (set to a filthy groove) "What's The Rumpus", "Hot Coals" still finds room for a classic of the Washington quartet, among the ideal titles to define the standards of this disciplined hysteria, of this soft revolution meant to be consumed strictly in living rooms papered in optical wallpaper.

Far more ferocity emerges from After Dark, which, not for nothing, is a sufficiently scorching (and scorched) live snapshot of this first couple of years, and which kicks off right away with the exalted, ritualized rhetoric of call and response (a truly over-the-top "Can I Hear U Say Yeah"). This album, recorded by Ian MacKaye during a show at London's The Garage, is also the one that contains the looming, venomous "Vs. Culture", the pulsating, deeply sick "We're Having A Baby" and, above all, the gorgeous sandpaper of one of the signature songs of the entire Svenonius saga, "Blue Is Beautiful".
With "The Final Comedown" the organ takes center stage for the gospel excess the moment called for (in a theatrical key), even if the inevitable apotheosis arrives right at the close, with a scathing "(Here Comes) The Judge".
Deep down, at least at first, the quartet is famous above all for its live shows, to put it mildly eventful (though without matching, in number or severity, the incidents/injuries of the band's previous experience), a reputation that will never let up and that will let Make-Up share the stage with Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Ted Leo, Mr. Quintron, Blonde Redhead, Les Savy Fav and Slant 6, among others.

Meanwhile, the third studio album is nearly finished and sees the light of day, once again via Dischord, in April 1998, the same year a split with Scottish band Lungleg also shows up in specialty record stores.

For the quartet, In Mass Mind (a pun on the polysemy of the word "mass", which can mean both "crowd" and the religious "mass") marks a far more knowing return to their usual R'n'B and blues coordinates, increasingly orbiting Black musical antiquarianism and leaning toward a wonderfully feral rock'n'roll revival ("Live In The Rhythm Hive"). It's arguably the most taut and biting record under this name – less scattershot naïveté, more healthy hysteria – very fittingly steered back onto philologically correct tracks, with Ian free to run riot between fantasy and showmanship. Particularly convincing here is the live-sounding production, with a rough, reverberant sound free of adulteration, even more vicious than on previous records, alongside the frontman's leering delivery, the ambiguous nocturnal atmospheres sketched by Canty's guitar, and a rhythm section that's swollen just the right amount without ever becoming overbearing (the soft, à-la Doors finale of "Watch It With That Thing").

"Joy Of Sound" and "Do You Like Gospel Music?" are truly Svenonius at the peak of his potential, joyously lost in his sharp-tongued metamusical musings with unmatched passion, yet at the same time able to assert himself through that ragged, formidable decadence: titles that are, needless to say, programmatic, further paradigms of an aesthetic that's artificial, patched-together and as scruffy as you like, but which this showman's tattered verve helps turn into something utterly sincere, visceral and gripping. It's true that Ian tries, mostly without success ("Drop The Needle" or "Come Up To The Microphone", which favor the endearingly shambolic and chaotic band of the earliest releases), to rein in a ham acting that remains, as usual, the real expressive key to an artist who's part showman, part madman. So, in a "Centre Of The Earth" that mixes Motown quotation with playful spirit, no limits are placed on the frontman's animated cross-dressing antics and his thoroughly ruined falsettos.

The production by Adam & Eve (the Hagerty/Herrema duo) broadens the band's exploratory horizons, finally allowing them to delve into the most hidden corners of their reference genres. The fever of "(I Have Heard About) Saturday Nite" unfolds from a rather menacing, hallucinated perspective, a blues that doesn't skimp on unease and comes across as thoroughly inhospitable.
That mood is then suitably tempered by the melancholy inconclusiveness of "Time Machine" and, above all, by the velvet of the magnificent cover of Anita Baker's "Caught Up In The Rapture", a perfect expression of that long-heralded gospel yeh-yeh as the new stylistic gospel, led by organ and bass, with the record's softest lighting. The circle is closed by the reprise of "Black Wire", a reworking of MC5's "Black To Comm".

During 1999 the Make-Up return to release two LPs within a few months of each other. The fourth studio album, Save Yourself, comes out again on K Records in October, produced by Brendan Canty, making him the third Fugazi member to take on technical duties for the Washington D.C. band.
From the minimalist soul-blues opener of the title track, infectious and malevolent, the sound grows denser, murkier and more diseased, yet at the same time the spiritual dimension seems to break free from the limiting status of parody to assert itself as a more physical, concrete presence. The happily disheveled band of old has given way to a less impulsive, more reflective creature, buoyed by a restless, creeping magnetism all its own, as well as a curious tendency to reiterate grooves (in the manner of Can) that will find some tentative confirmation under the Weird War banner. The result is magmatic but sly, and far less hysterical than what the quartet had previously accustomed us to, though there's no shortage of notable acid surges like "The Bells". It's a collection of songs that may not be especially flashy but which all work excellently, especially in terms of overall mood.
Partial exceptions are "The Prophet", a more conventional example of the Svenoniusian aesthetic, dutifully programmatic but with far less bite than on previous records, and the delightful detour of "Call Me Mommy", a grotesque distortion applied to a miserable folk sketch worthy of the very earliest Beck.

While the instrumental side grows weightier, with Michelle's nagging bassline ("Feelin' Man") taking center stage, Ian seems to have gradually normalized his formula. "I want to be a big fish in a small pond", he declares on "C'mon Let's Spawn", setting aside the Nation Of Ulysses's revolutionary propaganda to push a far more low-key agenda, all within a decent bacchanal tinged with a vaguely jazzy flavor. "I Am Pentagon" is the new manifesto: ultra-relaxed and almost narcotic, the quartet still indulges here and there in the same soft, licentious R'n'B antiquarianism as before, fully within its comfort zone, with Svenonius as leering and feline as ever.
The finale offers an amiable bit of fun with a cover of "Hey Joe" and an even surprisingly restrained duet with Michelle. In other times this would have been a pyrotechnic display, but here it's merely a thoroughly enjoyable closing exercise, capped by a wonderfully hilarious fake-phone-call recital with the frontman finally going over the top.

Listen closely and there's even more euphoria – from the almost danceable (yet dusk-tinged) opening of "Pow! To The People" to the rancid dive-bar blues of "Have U Heard The Tapes" – on I Want Some, a compilation of singles, rarities and outtakes that the usual K label released as a double LP just a few months earlier. The mood tends toward the playful, thanks to an Ian who's obviously inclined toward scene-stealing (a rowdy "Born On The Floor", the title track) even if he doesn't quite match the frenzied extremes of the past. Here he settles for juggling tricks, a playful verve full of winks and languid, sly-seducer poses ("Little Black Book", "I Am If"), while his bandmates duly indulge his quirks and extravagances.
Ironically malevolent, with an increasingly central role handed to the organ's smoke-and-mirrors ("Hey! Orpheus"), the Make-Up seem to have set aside their usual vitriol to revel in a lubricious carousel, even in more toxic, stripped-down versions prone to a shabby melancholy, as in the thoroughly ruined crooning (and the miserable yet beautiful spleen) of "The Choice".

One might therefore be tempted to file I Want Some away as a record that reins in the label's usual visceral weirdness in order to foreground the Washington quartet's more properly Dadaist streak instead, drawing its strength from lightness and its dazed-sounding delivery. All fair enough, except that on the second side all the band's garage-rock lifeblood comes bursting out uncontainably. From the rough "Every Baby Cries The Same", with its sludgy, backward-looking grime that brings the band close to the bastardized funk of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the revivalist streak increasingly takes over, stealing more and more ground from the hardcore-punk instincts of Nation Of Ulysses, though it's plenty of fun all the same.
While "We're Having A Baby" dials the womanly emphasis in his stretched, uterine vocal delivery up to the highest degree of exasperation – a true guaranteed trademark – and "This Is Young Vulgarians" is a thoroughly sturdy, highly abrasive episode, a perfect expression of the band's wildest nature, the sharp (and over-the-top) "R U A Believer" shows the Make-Up at their best, no longer weighed down by those high-school-comedian rhetorical dynamics but scorching enough to leave a mark.
"Blue Is Beautiful" and "Free Arthur Lee" are genuine musts, with the former restoring the roaring, just-right-schizoid temperament of their early days, while the latter stands as a kind of irresistible mantra, both brazen and cathartic. But there are plenty of other standout titles, from the unruly "Untouchable Sound" – a manifesto as scrappy as it is incisive – to the swaying, vaguely tipsy "Under The Impression", or from "I Didn't Mean 2 Turn U On", which settles the score quite authoritatively with the sour, jagged Blonde Redhead of the mid-Nineties, to "Sustance Abuse", one of the filthiest, most vinegary titles in a collection that's poisonous, yes, but always extremely enjoyable.

At the end of 1999 guitarist Alex Minoff, Mae's husband and already frontman of Golden and Extra Golden, officially joins the band. He can be heard on the live album Untouchable Sound, released only in 2006, though his tenure turns out to be rather brief given the Make-Up's breakup at the start of 2000. Once again, Ian attributes the end of one of his projects to purely external reasons, in this case the proliferation of unspecified copycat outfits who had allegedly applied the band's look and sound to empty, counter-revolutionary musical formulas. Whatever the case, the momentum had clearly run out and the whole experience could be considered over: "We had our five-year plan, like Stalin, but it was starting to get a bit redundant, and a lot of people had started copying us". While Canty settles into Ted Leo's court, the singer already has a new lineup in mind alongside Mae, Minoff and others, but first (June 2001) he chooses to release his solo debut under the moniker David Candy.

David Candy, Weird War, Scene Creamers

Play Power is a singer-songwriter record of a kind only a figure à-la Svenonius (here flanked and produced by Death By Chocolate's Jez Butler and John Austin) could have conceived, one that, right from the emblematic "Listen To The Music", mixes sophisticated crooning, hints of beat-sunshine pop (somewhere between Rod Argent and the Monkees), beggarly soul and much more besides. Taking center stage and tilting the record toward pure divertissement are the ironic spoken-word pieces inspired by beat poetry, set over backing tracks that are now flamenco ("Redfuchsiatamburine & Gravel", which revives the food obsessions and pleasant digressions of Ween, obviously in a parodic key aimed at certain psychedelic excesses of the late Seventies), now bubblegum ("Incomprehensibly Yours"), before sublimating into the twenty minutes of the monumental, organ-led (and bongo-driven) confession "Diary Of A Genius", a torrential soliloquy that apes the Doors and certain aestheticizing drifts of a musical lyricism tied entirely to the clichés of the nocturnal imaginary. It all closes with the unsettling chant of "Lullaby For Rosemary's Baby", whose title already says it all.

The record itself is a work that's nothing short of eccentric, an unbroken stream of consciousness, wild and whimsical, stuffed with musical antiquarianism, culinary and sartorial advice, and a textbook outlet for his retro-pop mania, starting with the protagonist and fictional alter ego modeled on the character of Toby Dammitt (from the Fellinian segment of "Spirits Of The Dead") and on the fictional singers Max Frost and Steven Shorter, each elevated to leader or messiah status in two other late-Sixties cult films ("Wild In The Streets" and "Privilege"). An odd but enjoyable work, in short, the kind that would mostly delight semioticians, and which also contains a dose of early Bowie ("Bad Bad Boy") along with an outrageous number of digressions on anarchist literature, modernism, historical materialism, supremacism, but above all on everything that is style, rigorously at the center of every futile speculation by the arrogant, pretentious David Candy, a genuine hipster ante litteram.

Still in the course of 2001, Svenonius's new project is essentially in its break-in period. Dubbed Weird War, it starts out as a kind of collective of musicians drawn from various self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian bands, presenting itself as "the only response to hype-driven careerism, to the empty formalism and vacuity that has infected what was once a genuinely creative underground rock scene, in order to challenge the idiocy of the new era".
Alongside Ian and Michelle, the lineup comes to include guitarists Neil Hagerty (Pussy Galore, Royal Trux) and Jessica Espeleta (Love As Laughter), plus drummer Steve McCarty. Their eponymous full-length debut is released by Drag City in August of the following year.

Beyond the rhetoric of its manifestos, the content rejects any political slant, since Ian considers the lyricist an almost irrelevant figure compared to the performer, and remains far more interested in subtext, in a narrative aimed, in its own modest way, at pushing back against dominant consumer culture and what the artist calls "rock'n'roll revisionism".
Inside Weird War, then, there's much more frivolity, and the metamorphosis can be considered essentially complete, heading toward a gleeful power-pop with funk digressions or touches in the Stones mold. The gang gives the impression of having a great deal of fun, and it hardly matters if Svenonius's uniqueness pays the price of an undeniable loss of identity. At times Hagerty doesn't shy away from carving out his own space, leaving Ian to play the languid sidekick ("Chicago Charlemagne"), increasingly drawn to a repertoire of Jaggeresque swagger (just listen to "Burgers And Fries").

Everything inevitably sounds more constrained for a free agent like him, but the greater predictability is still offset by the galloping playful tone as well as the sumptuous production, on a record that pushes hard on the entertainment pedal, which here and there skirts a still-spirited kind of formula but, all things considered, also proves a pleasant diversion for his devoted fans.
Weird War thus comes across as a (prolonged) holiday from himself for the frontman, lubricious and loose enough but perhaps a touch less wild than it should have been. That gap in raw instinct doesn't undermine the success of a project that, as pure divertissement, remains pretty enjoyable all the same (the exotic vitality of "Ibex Club" and its boozy drift, the duly cleaned-up hysteria of "Pick Up The Phone And Ball", or the stripped-down title track, a folk-rock ballad entrusted to a phlegmatic Michelle Mae).
In the second half, the frontman seems to shake off any remaining shyness and takes center stage with full force in a series of sturdy, striking snapshots, from the dutiful garage-rock earworm "I Live In A Dream" to the joke track "Man Is Money", via the bluesy, hallucinated "Name Names", yet another display of a Dionysian streak carried out at a very fine level of typicality.

After the record's release, Hagerty, Espeleta and McCarty depart to focus on new projects – respectively Howling Hex, Soddamn Inssein and Dead Meadow – but they're replaced by Minoff on guitar and Blake Brunner behind the drums. The group changes its name to Scene Creamers and, under this new banner, releases its second album, I Suck On That Emotion, again via Drag City, in January 2003.
Behind the new name, the band shows a greater desire to pursue grotesque distortion ("Better All The Time" or the sluggish "What About Me?", once again worthy of Ween), but the overall picture remains the pleasantly fired-up one of its predecessor, only with an even more full-blooded framework and thicker southern inflections. Amid pocket-sized electric whirlpools, Ian doesn't give up his trademark ham acting, but the rougher, grimmer production brings out his devilish theatrics all the better, duly served by a band that's meaner than ever ("Session Man"), one in which Minoff's torrential, surly blues guitar work – he being Mae's husband – really makes itself felt.
The record is a fine diary of obsessions, made all the more menacing by the looming bass and a vocal delivery far more sordid and morbid than usual. At the same time, the revivalist streak tends here and there to become especially pronounced ("Candidate"), with Svenonius quite literally gliding through these murky, retro scenarios.

It's all a joke, but the band seems to be taking it damn seriously, as evidenced by the sprightly little sketch of "Luxembourg", the delightful duet of filthy bubblegum in "Bag Inc.", or the spineless, Beck-à-la blues goofing-off of "Elfin Orphan", to name just three titles at random. More than ever, Ian shows himself in service to the music and the songs rather than the other way around, and rarely has he come across in poses or interpretations more languid and polished than on "Hey Lonnie". He's clearly forced to normalize his own idiosyncrasies, but the result remains praiseworthy, as cohesive as it hasn't been since the days of Nation Of Ulysses. The one real exception is the sequel to "Here Comes The Judge, Pt. II", in perfect Make-Up style, which throws an ideal bridge back to the past for any lost admirers.

Following a legal dispute with a French graffiti collective over the name, the band dusts off the Weird War moniker for the third chapter of their adventure, If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em, produced by Bill Skibbe (already an apprentice to Albini for "1000 Hurts" by Shellac) and once again released by Drag City in January 2004, featuring guest appearances from Jennifer Herrema's purring vocals (credited as JJ Rox), Azita's piano, and above all the new drummer, Sebastian Thomson of Trans Am. After the ironic intro of "Music For Masturbation", the feverish blues-rock excoriation picks right back up, as harsh and vicious as the frontman hasn't been perhaps in a dozen years. Granted, the original post-hardcore has given way to a psych-hard-rock with ferrous inflections and near-stoner rumblings ("Moment In Time", "Grand Fraud"), a gargantuan guitar sound that duels with the inevitably scaled-back physiological showmanship of Ian. The result is always fairly enjoyable, but the maximalist drift seems to have taken a bit of shine off the sidelined bandleader, increasingly just another piece on the board, further drained of oxygen reserves by the rhythm section's commendable work; the fuzz and other effects complete the reversal of a show-off persona almost entirely diverted onto the instrumental side.

If, with its dazed, lysergic folk weirdness, "Tess" confirms that it might really be the most psychedelically inclined work in the entire Svenonius catalogue, the title track is another page of compact, obsessive, slightly heavy-handed rage, while the funky flourishes make "Store Bought Pot" a particularly fun and acidic episode, whose programmatic nature once again saps some momentum from the whole.
The impression, then, is of a rough exercise that's more calculated than felt, with Svenonius for once appearing rather bored too (just listen to the lifeless dialogue of "Chemical Rank" with an otherwise mischievous Michelle). In short, after a promising start, If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em folds in on itself, and the many autopilot moments leave it spinning its wheels. Closing the circle is a finale steeped in pure self-indulgence, a "One By One" that mimics the soundscapes of Pink Floyd, but muddies them with Ian's evocative spoken word.

Another year goes by and good old Drag City already has a new album from the band in its catalogue, with the previous four-piece line-up confirmed in toto. This final chapter of the Weird War segment, Illuminated By The Light, emphasizes the playful, carnival-barker streak that's certainly more suited to the bandleader's innate theatrical gifts. His bandmates go back to serving his antics, though this record too remains far more musically accomplished and virtuosic than anything found in the previous projects. The balance between eclectic quirk and iconoclastic drive becomes enjoyable again, even if Ian was more endearing when expressing his unspoiled naïveté without reservation.
While "Destination: Dogfood" or the funky flourishes of "Girls Like That" are clear leftovers from the more immediate predecessor — respectively spicier and following a more minimal logic — the quartet unleashes its romantic side on the instrumental "A Visit To The Cave", while Ian goes back to playing Ian, even more ungainly and yowling than usual, on the tribalist sketch "Earth, Mama, Woman, Girl, Child", which brings out his more feminine freak soul. The band's re-creation thus carries on as we knew it: thoroughly relaxed, proudly inessential, entirely an end unto itself, but done with class.

With a sound polished to just the right degree and less draining, plus a Svenonius in pretty good form, the listen is once again enjoyable in its blatant lack of seriousness, and never mind if the languid pace and recycled structures make a few passages a bit soporific too. Beyond a generic pleasantness, as in the languid, honeyed power-pop/bubblegum of "See About Me", what's missing is a truly memorable track (the closest it gets is the sensual earworm "Motorcycle Mongoloid"), and one remains stuck in the somewhat grey automatisms of this otherwise fine, routine output. The exception comes right at the end, because while "Put It In Your Pocket" is a classic journeyman's number, you can't deny it an irresistible groove capable of redeeming not just the greater predictability of Illuminated By The Light but of the whole Weird War adventure.

Chain & The Gang

With this latest experience also filed away, Ian devotes himself for a while to other side activities, first and foremost that of essayist. In July 2006, Drag City Press publishes "The Psychic Soviet", an anthology of articles already published in magazines or entirely unseen, aimed at "untangling the confusion surrounding the most disparate artistic, geopolitical or philosophical events of the last millennium", from rock'n'roll as a modern religion to the "cosmic depression" that followed the collapse of the USSR.
This first literary outing from the amiable American polemicist would be followed by two more on Akashic Books: "Supernatural Strategies For Making A Rock'n'Roll Group" (2013) and "Censorship Now!" (2015). At the same time, our man launches a career as a sharp-tongued host on the show "Soft Focus", on the web TV channel VBS, whose artistic director is filmmaker Spike Jonze (who insists on having him at all costs). In this role he delivers a series of memorable, ironic interviews with colleagues like Ian MacKaye, Cat Power, Will Oldham, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon (from the Guggenheim Museum in New York), but also the late Mark E. Smith or Wild Billy Childish (in the show's London offshoot). On the musical side, worth noting is his vocal cameo in support of Publicist, the solo project of former bandmate Sebastian Thomson, very active live before leading to a series of EP releases.

Not much time can pass, however, with Svenonius relegated to the uncomfortable role of non-protagonist. Hence the launch, via K, in April 2009, of the new creation Chain And The Gang.
After the excesses of Weird War, thanks to Down With Liberty… Up With Chains! Ian rediscovers the more intimate dimension perhaps most congenial to him — essentially a personal project with a backing band, including, among others, Karl Blau, Arrington De Dionyso, Aaron and Benjamin Hartman (Old Time Relijun), Chris Sutton (Gossip) and, once again, Calvin Johnson, also serving as producer. Bare-bones, if not downright threadbare, production, gospel leftovers (tout court rather than yeh-yeh) and radical minimalism: the chase after the clichés of vintage Black American rock can finally be called complete with the bleak, crooked evocations of "Cemetery Map", almost the soundtrack to a voodoo ritual. But the spiritual tone comes and goes, leaving room for the more prosaic exorcisms of the classic Svenonius, free-flowing patter ("Trash Talk"), boneless, ectoplasmic girl-group rock'n'roll.
Needless to say, the standout moments are the most devilish and venomous ones, like "Reparations", an irresistible tirade on the wreckage of politics and of a media-cultural system in terminal decline. Stylistically, there's a glut of cheap, repeated schematics that, elevated in form by their apparent amateurism, define the character of a project that might seem shoddy but which, precisely in this humbler, lowlier guise, holds the secret of a truly lethal infection.

The boogie of "What Is A Dollar?" is emblematic of a return to a more pronounced theatricality (one that hides a purity all its own), not to mention the mocking jab at music criticism found in the fake interview of "Interview With The Chain Gang", a blend of scornful satire and delightful (self-)revivalism. The true gem, however, is "Deathbed Confession", a martial invective straight out of the late Sixties, lit up by a wound-up Ian and his cooing odalisques. The guitar plays it essential but sufficiently biting, proof that you don't need grand production or instrumental setups, and that the frontman's sermons are once again at the center of everything, properly backed by the right vibrations (listen too to the shreds of primitivism in "Cave Girl", stripped down and served up still sizzling in rigorous lo-fi).
Less is more, it really must be said, and this slimming-down regimen seems to suit the bandleader well after the recent electric excesses. For those nostalgic for the vintage frivolity of the Make-Up brand, there's still the mild bacchanal of "Room 19", also excellent for easing the tension built up along the way, plus the pleasant jazzy touches and a slightly tipsy brass swell in the closer, "Unpronounceable Name".

Less than two years go by and Chain & The Gang already have the follow-up ready, Music's Not For Everyone, once again recorded by Calvin Johnson at the Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, WA, and once again released by K Records, with a near-identical roster of guests and collaborators.
The sophomore record doesn't shift the coordinates one bit and opens right away with a rough, thoroughly slapdash earworm ("Why Not?"), another paradigmatic episode of the new aesthetic. The same raspy showmanship is then unleashed again on "Livin' Rough", amid acid little organs and tight tirades set to music by a completely out-of-control Chuck Berry, while the double bracket of "Detroit Music" dusts off, with all the devotion of true connoisseurs, the hysteria from the Make-Up's scrapbook of memories. The sun-baked sketch of "For Practical Purposes (I Love You)", halfway between blues and calypso, confirms the new project's stamp of cheerful, citation-happy miniaturism, like genuine scrap dealers of the American musical tradition. And between one backward-looking joke and the next, with the bitterly titled "It's A Hard, Hard Job (Keeping Everybody High)", Svenonius finds a way to pull yet another little gem out of his hat, an austere litany that's also a well-aimed indictment of the Administration's misdeeds in the fallout of the war in Afghanistan.

The mantra of the title track, leaden and strung-out, seems to pre-emptively answer the poor reception from critics and audiences the album would meet, lacking the protective alibi of the surprise effect. In truth, Music's Not For Everyone has nothing to envy in its predecessor, including in its lighter digressions ("Can't Get Away", the sly returning girl-group sound of "Bill For The Use Of A Body") or its moments of pure Svenonius-style goofing-off ("I've Got Privilege"). Rounding things out are "Youth Is Wasted On The Young", a retrieval of the debut's dusty intimacy (fit to be played ad libitum), and above all the chant of "Not Good Enough", which indelibly fixes the poetics of losers so dear to Ian, while the carefree melodicism shapes a genuinely killer refrain (not coincidentally reprised later in the tracklist in a scrappy — and no less irresistible — reprise), among the most convincing pages of this latest slice of his career.

Just a few months later, K surprise-releases the third chapter of the Chain & The Gang adventure, with the only notable change being the drums, now entrusted to Fiona Campbell of Vivian Girls. In Cool Blood marks a fairly decisive turn toward garage rock, with the opener "Hunting For Love" giving the illusion of being unruly and on the rotten side of things. The sense of a rowdier, heavier-footed record, at times grimed up with fuzz and barking vocals, turns out to be a red herring, as the sly big single "Certain Kind Of Trash" makes clear apertis verbis right after, unleashing the requisite female foil (the future frontwoman of Priests, Katie Alice Greer) in a cholesterol-laden duet. Between girl-group with real attitude and Trashmen-style caricature, the gang shifts its revivalism a little further into the Sixties ("If I Only Had A Brain", "Free Will"), with lesser primitivist ambitions and a bit more wholesome goofing around, an impression confirmed by the introduction of puffing little organs in amusing yet harmless bubblegum pantomimes like "You Better Find Something To Do" and "'Nuff Said". Never, in all likelihood, has Ian shown himself so inclined toward melody in his vocal outpourings.

The record is undeniably pleasant and fun, meticulously crafted with an undeniable vintage drive, yet behind the mimicry game, Svenonius's joyful anarchy seems to have completely lost its trail, and the result feels far less crazed and scrambled than its raw predecessors. What remains is the boundless love letter to a musical aesthetic fallen from grace, but the iconoclastic tone of the glory days has given way to breezy eccentricity and a formalism that's also quite sui generis (the two segments of "I'm Not Interested", the apotheosis of the two-handed showmanship that here takes center stage). It's a safe, comfortable ride, right on the money of historically correct form, even if the scorching polemical rants are a distant memory.
The nastiness is simulated even in the moments that seem ideally suited to it ("Panther's Cage"), and there's no straying from the standard of a game of stylistic disguise that is as flawless as it is, in the long run, even tedious: plenty of craft but little venom this time around. There's no shortage of exceptions, though, from the twilight interlude of "Heavy Breathing" (with the frontman baring his heart over a theatrically languid crooning) to the Cramps-à-la finale of the title track: the cards of romanticism and psychotic drift, as long as they're not overplayed, always pay off.

2012 also sees the first reunion of the Make-Up, who perform after a dozen years at the spring edition of All Tomorrow's Parties curated by Mogwai, in London. Further tours would follow in Europe and North America over the next five years, the last ones without Gamboa, replaced behind the kit by Mark Cisneros of Deathfix (the latest creation of James's brother, Brendan). It takes another couple of years, though, for Chain & The Gang to get back on their feet. Calvin Johnson has handed off technical duties to Alex Yusimov and Brendan Canty, but otherwise the new Minimum Rock'n'roll, surprise-released on Fortuna Pop, broadly confirms the lineup from the previous record.

By now it's clear that, compared to the roaring days of 13-Point Program To Destroy America or In Mass Mind, all-out radicalism has been splendidly replaced by irony and an unbridled passion for the past. The clearest proof is this album, which presents itself in the vein of the house's unmistakable, grimy garage-blues, bringing the Make-Up at least partly back together in what is only the first of a series of devilish duets ("Devitalize"). There's barely a moment to settle in before we're back in the soft, flirtatious mood of the earliest productions, with a rumpled soul number made all the more intriguing by the coquettish performance of the vocalist, Katie Alice Greer: grime and grace don't hesitate to share the stage in yet another fine contrast — needless to say — pulled off beautifully.
From here on, the most disparate Svenonius incarnations take turns in the spotlight. With its scruffy, charging revivalism, "Mum's The Word" brings back the Ian who's neither too fierce nor too benevolent, already at the helm of his less fortunate creations the decade before; the rough yet languid seducer of the repertoire's "romantic" passages reappears as a master of mimicry on "I'm a Choice (Not a Child)", while right in the closing bars it's the tarantula-bitten, straitjacketed one who takes the lead role, in a breathless run as chaotic as it is irresistible; not to mention the feverish preacher who returns to rage with his supremely unlovely feminine shrieks on "Got To Have It Every Day", amid salty polemics, placid improvisation and lapidary madness.

A research into sound that once again borders on the philological, its substantial truth, remains the crown jewel of a project always conceived as a farcical divertissement. Hence the emphasis on dazzling verve, the use of thoroughly banal (yet catchy) little tunes, and that happy predisposition for the vintage that's never a mere facade, choosing instead to reek of weirdness from a mile away. There's no other way to explain the relaxed, minimalist celebration of this mythological musical universe at the dawn of everything (the title track), the usual healthy dose of r'n'b trash ("Stuck In A Box"), the vicious girl-group echoes ("Curtain Pull"), the fine Tarantino-esque number — desperate and twilight-toned just enough — with a whiff of B-movie dropout ("What R U In Here For?"), or the bold instrumental swells so reminiscent of a Seventies cop show ("Fairy Dust"). Yes indeed, the police.

In reminding us that "crime doesn't pay", the relentless wail of its sirens pushes to the extreme the crime-rock label skillfully coined by the old Chicago war-horse, and it's then inevitable to think back to the jailbird imagery on the covers of the first two albums by Chain and his gang (even if live the convict uniforms of the first couple of years have since been replaced by improbable pineapple-yellow or shimmery maroon suits). No more fake spirituals this time around, just the occasional rhythmic sermon in Motown sauce, the obvious heap of old-fashioned junk, and that renewed tendency toward fragmentation that perhaps weakens the whole, especially on a weaker second side. This time around, though, there's less sloppiness, and the record also wins you over with its licentious indolence: it's a faithful testimony to the incorrigible genius who conceived it, a loose cannon almost fanatically in love with his own outdated rhetoric and touching mannerism.

Ian Svenonius' 2017 can reasonably be labeled one of those exceptionally intense years. Having put behind him the run of dates that saw him go wild again fronting the resurrected Make-Up (the double show at Barcelona's Primavera was apparently memorable), the eccentric American artist also treats himself to a fake solo debut under the name Escape-ism. Two significant events that are, in a sense, side notes to the grand relaunch of the Chain & The Gang project, with a collection of reinterpretations of past material (Best Of Crime Rock), a live album recorded at the court of admirer Jack White (Live At Third Man Records), and the fifth full-length chapter, out on his own label Radical Elite.

Recorded live on a four-track in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a beefed-up Gang thanks to the additions of Gories guitar veteran Danny Kroha and Fred Thomas, Shelley Salant and Amber Fellows of Tyvek, Experimental Music comes out swinging on pure enthusiasm. It's a record that seeks lightness more than ever, cheekily self-aware in its lush revivalist emphasis and geared toward putting the brakes on the rocker's proverbial decay, now that he's edging toward his fiftieth spring. Once again, it's the Chicago showman's unmatched irony that takes center stage, chastising affectations and customs that aren't only musical, but the touch here is graceful, even dazed, and that does wonders for the label's usually wordy hysteria. The old incendiary verve has mellowed, as is well known, but Svenonius's tongue remains as forked and irrepressible as ever, even when put to work on seemingly harmless garage-blues sketches.
If "If I Was An Animal" is an invective that's not only pro-animal but also feminist, dressed up in a worn, thoroughly enjoyable falsetto worthy of similar outings by King Khan with the Shrines, somewhere between sour romanticism and beat-era retro-chic, our man turns joyously aggressive again on "Rome Wasn't Burnt In A Day", halfway between the sleaze of a Mark Arm, the old-school punk of Wild Billy Childish, and the more current kind favored by his "godchild" Katie Alice Greer, all under the banner of an accessibility that's nonetheless never been so shameless.

Experimental Music lines up a collection of ten tracks, nimble and immediate in their simplicity, that strike out the missteps in songwriting that have long weakened this project with one too many clunkers in its repertoire. Ian, in short, comes across as more focused and effective than ever in his tireless mission of old-fashioned proselytizing, with less sloppiness for its own sake and even more amateur-grade precision, less hazy showmanship and more easy-listening passion, fewer sermons or conceptual musings and more pure, unadulterated poetry, reaching new heights in the sturdy proto-punk frenzy of "Come Over" and above all in the sublime rock'n'roll ease of the darting "Don't Scare The Ghost Away" and "Three Made A Fool Out Of Me". The inflection remains here and there superbly melancholic, long one of the best tricks up the sleeve of this imperishable smart-aleck of the indie circus.
Squarely in Make-Up territory, the closer "I Hate Winners" then stands as a reminder, yet another piece of an identity manifesto, lovable in its cockiness, that carries on its tireless work of self-preservation for at least a quarter century now.

But let's get back to Ian's much-touted debut, Introduction To Escape-ism, a small, long-announced album that, on closer inspection, isn't really a solo debut at all. There was in fact that ante litteram send-up of hipster phenomenology credited to the alias David Candy, a thoroughly enjoyable concept album released sixteen years earlier, but in the press release the folks at Merge are careful not to mention it. As anyone who makes a habit of tailing the rocker well knows, even the Escape-ism name, borrowed from beloved James Brown, isn't exactly a novelty either, having already been used to label a one-man show he'd performed live in recent years. The ever-elegant American artist now launches it on record too, under the banner of wave minimalism and an electronic primitivism that recalls Suicide.

Stylistically we're perhaps closer to his vocal cameos for Publicist (his friend Sebastian Thomson's project) or to the off-the-cuff electro project he put together in 2014 with Frenchman Didier Balducci, aka Memphis Electronic, XYZ (with two albums in five years, XYZ and the very recent Artificial Flavoring), minus the pop buzz though, and dressed in a lo-fi outfit that leaves no room for flights of fancy. Ian really does everything himself here, with only percussion and production help from Facundo Bermudez (right-hand man of No Age), plus guest sax and guitar from Black Lips' Cole Alexander and Zumi. The highlighter-bright guitar set against a backdrop of sparse synthetic disturbances signs off on an exaggerated stylization, which acts as a counterweight to the particularly listless and half-hearted Svenonius on display this time. His writing, essential as ever, still manages to hit the mark even here, though the lackluster moments outnumber the genuinely interesting ones. The refrains work but don't exactly thrill, because our man's incendiary streak stays dutifully muted throughout ("Rome Wasn't Burnt In A Day", a watered-down clone of one of the titles from the most recent Chain & The Gang record).

Without the alibi of a collateral (and somewhat self-indulgent) pastime, it would be hard to consider this "Introduction" anything more than a dull, navel-gazing trifle, one that drains the roguish expressionism of the Washington D.C. author, reducing it to a lifeless (and distinctly unimpassioned) rehash of his trademark aesthetic — a paradigm nicely embodied by the narcotized, strobe-lit eighties revivalism of the closing "Crime Wave Rock". It's a little game in which even Ian's proverbial irony ends up languishing wistfully, buried under one too many yawns, and a work that's also rather repetitive and monotone, one that, amid electric flashes that never truly grab you, falsettos and muttered recitations (always lacking that liberating jolt), genuinely struggles to get going. Svenonius doggedly rolls out his naive poetics made of intellectualisms polished to a fine polemical sheen ("Almost No One Can Have My Love"), though without the backing of the musical side — at times spicy, at times open to old-fashioned sophistication — the exercise proves rather sterile, pointless, faded. The overexposed, decadent, slapdash sketch of "I Don't Remember You" is the exception, but it's really too little. Svenonius's trademark rhetoric, pushed to its extreme in terms of cliché and stripped at the same time of fire and venom, leaves one puzzled ("The Stars Get In The Way").

And just to prove he's not messing around, the following year sees the punctual arrival of The Lost Record, which reprises the same formula with just a bit more bite, also reworking a few tracks from its predecessor.
The impression, with these gloomy, skeletal songs, is of standing before certain deep-sea creatures, the kind that move in total darkness and only light it up intermittently with their lure-lamps, hunting for potential prey. In this case, however, even the most ardent fans of the former Make-Up and Nation Of Ulysses frontman will struggle to take the bait so readily. Speaking of which, all that's missing now is the resurrection of these old rogues, and then we really will have seen them all, (re-)united.

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