Thalia Zedek - Come - Torment Without Ecstasy

Thalia Zedek is one of the key figures of American indie rock of recent years. A career spanning more than twenty years, built on refined songwriting and poetic sensibility, moving between rock, folk and punk contamination. A kind of conscience of musical America, the Patti Smith of indie-rock, she has ranged from the 70s post-punk of small outfits like Dangerous Birds, Uzi and Live Skull, all the way to an austere, deeply emotional singer-songwriter craft. Personal, brooding ballads, chasing tense, obsessive atmospheres, made of spectral, hauntingly beautiful rock and blues that Thalia's raspy voice sharpens and shapes.

Thalia Zedek's musical story begins in 1982. Born in Washington in 1962, she had moved to Boston in 1979, where she combined her university studies with her first musical experiences. Her first achievement of any real note dates back to 1982, when, with an all-female group called Dangerous Birds, she released a seven-inch titled "Alpha Romeo", now all but impossible to find. On "Smile On Your Face" Thalia's voice bears the influence of Patti Smith almost to the point of outright imitation; the music is equally indebted to the combat-rock of the era, embodied to perfection by the very priestess of Chicago herself, to a certain dark-punk sound in the vein of Siouxsie, but also, to a lesser extent, to the dark new wave of bands like Public Image Ltd and Suicide.

The Dangerous Birds experience ended a few years later without leaving much of a mark, and so a little later Thalia joined Uzi, who in 1986 released an EP, Sleep Asylum, on Homestead, which would soon become a much sought-after item among collectors, before Matador reissued it in 1994, by which point it had become completely unobtainable. Zedek had somewhat smoothed out the naive fury of her early days, and alongside that the instrumental level of the songwriting had grown too, helped by the contribution of more experienced musicians. On one of their best-known tracks, "Gabrielle", alongside Zedek's vocals - more assured now, though still somewhat raw in places - what stands out is Danny Lee's martial drumming and above all Randy Barnwell's Cure-schooled bass, which insistently evokes the funereal atmospheres of songs like "Play For Today" or "Primary". "Collections", meanwhile, sounds almost like a replay of Joy Division's "Dead Souls", at least until Thalia's voice comes in, at times softening the song's irregular, grim momentum - arguably the most ambitious track on the whole album.

The song that best anticipates what would become Come's defining traits is instead "Ha Ha Ha", with guitars shedding some of the suffocating darkwave conventions and taking on more varied tones, vaguely recalling the electric ballads of Neil Young, along with those sudden bursts of speed that would become one of the strengths of Thalia Zedek's later work.

The overall impression is that Sleep Asylum arrived a few years too late on the American rock scene, which in the second half of the 80s saw, on one hand, the rise of bands like Sonic Youth and Husker Du, who in their own way marked the emancipation from the golden age of new wave, and on the other the explosion of phenomena like college radio, which would in turn drive the success of bands like Rem and Pixies and, a few years later, all the bands that would be lumped together under the generic banner of grunge. But that's another story.

The Uzi adventure came to an end, apparently due to friction between Zedek and drummer Danny Lee, before the band could release a new record that had been rumored to be in the works. Thalia was then recruited by Live Skull, a band very active at the time in a loud, avant-garde strain of rock, of which she would become front-woman and lyricist, while remaining on the margins of the actual musical composition. By the time Zedek joined the band, they already had two albums under their belt, Bringing Home The Bait and Cloud One, which brought together a vast array of influences, often very far apart from one another, and which would persist even after Zedek's arrival: there are the spectacular, clattering guitars inspired by Albini ("Sparky", "The Loved One"), horror-tinged ballads in the style of Swans ("Boot Camp", "Cloud One", "Brains Big Enough"), but also flashes of Fall-style crooked rock ("Aircut For Pigs") or the abrasive sound of Husker Du ("Skin Jobs").

With Thalia Zedek's arrival in the band, Live Skull didn't change their distinctive traits all that much, continuing to produce noisy, sinister, stubbornly anti-commercial music, which Thalia's voice only occasionally softens with sporadic melodic turns - if anything, on most tracks it actually heightens the music's jagged, almost tribal character. Take songs like "Machete", "Was" or "Circular Saw", the latter sounding like the Pixies' "Bone Machine" played at double speed.

With the albums Dusted in 1988 and Positraction the following year, along with an EP released in between, the Live Skull story came to a close. For Thalia Zedek, however, what followed was perhaps the hardest period of her life. The musical endeavors she had been part of, in various capacities, had all essentially ended in failure, and she had no choice but to return to Boston, where she spent those years more or less resigned to an anonymous existence marked by hardship and loneliness, as well as by the destructive vices - alcohol and drugs - in which so many tormented personalities like hers end up seeking an impossible refuge.

Coming to her rescue, in the early 90s, was her friend Chris Brokaw, formerly drummer of Codeine, with whom she formed Come, the band that would finally bring her a measure of visibility. The new lineup, rounded out by Sean O'Brien on bass and Artur Johnson on drums, debuted in 1991 with an EP titled Car, released on the storied indie label Sub Pop. The three tracks that make it up build a bridge - still somewhat tentative - between the dark sounds of the bands Zedek had been part of in the 80s and new sonic directions that would be developed in the years to follow, drawing less on American new wave than on blues, on the electric ballads of Neil Young, on the Stones, but also on the psychedelic rock of bands like Dream Syndicate and Thin White Rope, standard-bearers of the so-called Paisley Underground. Above all stands "Submerge", a desert ballad that starts out subdued before suddenly picking up speed (a constant throughout their career); Brokaw, who had by then switched to guitar, seems to be channeling Karl Precoda, the legendary Dream Syndicate guitarist, with searing solos, albeit softened by a far more pronounced melodic streak.

Eleven Eleven is the band's proper debut, released the following year on Matador Records. The record, which opens with the aforementioned "Submerge", consolidates a new style blending Zedek's stormy, tormented streak - which often resurfaces in forms already heard mainly in Live Skull - with the slow-motion cadences Brokaw brought with him from Codeine, and from these two seemingly distant musical worlds comes a kind of frantic, jagged rock-blues, with frequent rhythmic shifts even within individual songs.

Alongside more "traditional" songs like "Off To One Side" (which could easily sit on a Screaming Trees record - after all, this is still 1992), "William" (in which one can almost detect echoes of the Sex Pistols), and the ballad "Sad Eyes", standout moments include "Brand New Vein", an aching blues (“Well I taste the sweetness of life/ And I lick off the knife/ And all the blood in my brain/ Will pump out a brand new vein”) propped up by a hiccupping rhythm and guitars leaning heavily on very Young-esque distortion, and "Orbit", which starts out as a graceless blues before suddenly speeding up in the chorus, much as happens in certain Patti Smith songs, with the vocals for once easing the tension by bringing in broad, unexpected doses of melody over a tightly wound, almost metal rhythm section.

The band's second album comes out in 1994 on Matador Records and is titled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The initial impression, later confirmed on repeated listens, is that Come have largely smoothed out the expressive urgency of Eleven: Eleven – a debut album, even if made by a band partly composed of established musicians – broadening the range of musical solutions and refining their playing. The rhythm section benefits most: not always impeccable on the previous record, here it sounds in great shape right from the opener "Finish Line", a track that, as often happens with Come, begins with near-whispered verses before cyclically exploding into a roar of distorted guitars and syncopated rhythms. The following "Mercury Falls" is one of the album's peaks, a track of tremendous instrumental force in which Zedek once again proves her gifts as a songwriter (it's hard not to be moved by lines like these: “Every time we say next time/ And every year we say next year/ Watch each other for a sign/ And spend another winter here”).

The album moves from the noisy rage of "Poison" or "Mercury Falls" itself to the apparent calm of "German Song" and "Arrive", the two tracks that bear the clearest traces of Brokaw's codeine-soaked past, passing through the more classic rock of songs like "Yr. Reign" or "String", all the way to the spectacular blues, flecked with slow-core spores, of "Let's Get Lost", one of the most heartfelt performances of Zedek's entire career.

The feeling is that music is truly her only lifeline: this is music that is unmistakably "depressed", erratic, visceral, spasmodic, yet never resigned, and without a trace of self-pity.

The following album, Near Life Experience, comes out in 1996 and is marked by major changes. Both Johnson and O'Brien have left – the entire rhythm section – and Brokaw and Zedek are now joined by well-known musicians, including Tara Jane O'Neil (who had passed through bands like Rodan and Sonora Pine) and, above all, John McEntire of Tortoise, key figures in a small and rather elite circle of the American indie scene: one gets the impression that the band wants to shake off the role of spokesperson for a certain rock "underclass", a label perhaps unfairly pinned on them by some.

The encounter, however, doesn't seem to bear the expected fruit, because the new elements introduced, especially in terms of composition and arrangements, end up distorting that moody, impulsive, unspoiled attitude that had always been the trademark of Thalia Zedek and every musical project she'd been part of in the past. The attempt to break out of the cult of a small circle of die-hard fans is almost blatant, with certain interpretive edges filed down and the accessibility level raised considerably, especially on tracks like "Hurricane", a song that's far from bad but seems hopelessly out of place here, or "Shoot Me First", sung entirely by Chris Brokaw, which sounds like Jesus & Mary Chain's "Automatic" or a very good Velvet Underground tribute act (which is more or less the same thing anyway).

The best moments are the ones where Zedek seems to remember her more cantankerous streak, as happens on "Bitten", whipped almost throughout by a hardcore rhythm before being unexpectedly calmed near the end by a trumpet straight out of the Tortoise playbook.

Amid echoes of the Rolling Stones ("Weak As The Moon") and the usual Neil Young ("Half-Life", "Secret Number"), there's even room, at the end, for a melodic ballad ("Slo-Eyed"), which vaguely recalls the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says" – balladry being ground that Zedek will return to extensively, and with better results, on her solo albums.

Gently Down The Stream, the band's fourth album, comes out in 1998 and is marked by yet another line-up change; the new rhythm section (Winston Bramen on bass and Daniel Coughlin on drums) proves top-notch right from the start: "One Piece", one of the most ambitious tracks in the whole Come discography, opens with a minute of dissonance, feedback and unsettling rhythmic trickery (were it not for the guitar tone, it would almost sound like the intro to Tim Buckley's "Come Here Woman"), then moves into a vaguely rock-jazz-inflected waltz over which Zedek's voice, skilfully restrained here, settles in, before closing exactly as it opened, with a sumptuous drum performance taking center stage. More than Neil Young, here the band seems to be looking to Robert Wyatt and the psychedelia of a few decades earlier.

The rest of the album sadly doesn't live up to that excellent start: "Stomp" sounds like Pearl Jam's "Tremor Christ", while "Recidivist" and "Silky City", tracks on which Zedek hands the mic to Chris Brokaw, are two ballads that don't stand out from the vast mass of rock songs written in that decade and the previous one by bands from the American indie underground. Elsewhere ("Sorry Too Late", "Saints Around My Neck") Zedek's more tormented blues soul resurfaces, though sweetened by a great deal of production polish and catchier choruses. In the end, alongside "One Piece", the most successful track seems to be "Middle Of Nowhere", a tender ballad that could have come from the pen of a Lucinda Williams at her most inspired.

It's hard, in short, to find a song on the album that isn't formally flawless, but perhaps that's exactly where its limits lie: smoothing off the rough edges has made the sound more reassuring, but it's a suit that doesn't fit well on Brokaw, and even less so on Thalia Zedek. It's perhaps no accident that Gently Down The Stream remains their final album.

It would take Zedek three years to release her debut solo work. Been Here And Gone comes out in 2001, and from the title alone it's clear this is the work of an artist and a woman looking back at the past with disillusioned eyes, concealing torment beneath a placid resignation. In an interview given in 2004, when asked to explain the difference between the music she'd made from her early days through to Come and the music on her solo albums, Thalia replies that all the emotions she felt in those years were translated into music in the pure form of anger, with no nuance or mediation; over time, Zedek continues, "instead of translating everything into anger, I try to explore different emotions. Not everything I see and experience makes me angry; it still happens, but I'm also able to channel the anger and unpack emotions in more interesting ways. I'm interested in writing more beautiful music", where the beauty probably lies precisely in variety, in the search for new solutions.

The raw-edged rage and fury of her early days, which had already been softening into the increasingly reassuring sounds of Come's later work, finally give way to a more meditative, pained songwriting, steeped in melancholy and disenchantment. But it's precisely in this new dimension that Zedek proves herself a songwriter of real talent, on a par with many of her more fortunate American peers: "Excommunications", perhaps her finest song, along with "Back To School" and the instrumental "10th Lament", are aching tracks that achieve one of the extraordinary feats music can pull off: carrying the listener back in time, letting them tenderly contemplate the author's memories as if they were their own. In the same vein are her covers of Luiz Bonfá's "Manha De Carnaval" and Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me To The End Of Love", faithful to the originals but not slavishly so.

On You're A Big Girl Now, an EP released the following year, Zedek tackles two more covers – the Dylan title track and the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says" (perhaps her least successful reinterpretation) – alongside four new tracks that don't stray far from the introspective mood of "Been Here And Gone".

In 2004, in a limited edition of 2000 copies, came Hell Is In Hello, a collection of live tracks drawing from Zedek's recent solo repertoire (the performance of "Temporary Guest", a track from Been Here And Gone, is especially sublime) and from Come. There are covers here too, the most striking of which is perhaps Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World", performed with guitar, viola and piano accompaniment by a visibly moved Zedek.

On Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness (2004) Thalia Zedek is accompanied only by drums, piano and viola; the structure of the songs is by now far removed from rock conventions, but also from the markedly singer-songwriter mood that defined her first solo LP. The inspiration seems to lean toward a kind of avant-garde folk ("Ship", "Bus Stop", "Virginia"), and it's not unusual to pick up on echoes, among the album's notes, of bands like Dirty Three, albeit cast in a more traditional song form – especially in the sophisticated drumming of Daniel Coughlin and the extensive use of viola, which dictates the melody far more than the guitar does. More than blues and Patti Smith, then, Zedek now seems to be looking toward the new American folk of artists like Lisa Germano or Cat Power, though she remains distant from the sort of lofty, critically pampered pedestal that these and other peers have occupied for well over a decade now.

In 2008 came what is still her latest album to date, Liars And Prayers. Musically, it's not far removed from the sound of Trust Not…; in every other respect, Liars And Prayers can easily be described as a political record: right from the opening track, "Next Exit", the singer-songwriter unleashes a barrage of invective against one enemy in particular, that George W. Bush who, after September 11th, dragged America into the quagmire of endless wars and "with us or against us" rhetoric (“Show us the body/ The thousands of bodies/ And the ones you tried to hide/ That you buried deep in lies”, she sings in one line of the song: it's the beginning of 2008 and the withdrawal from Iraq is still a long way off). On the closing track the attack becomes even more explicit and cutting (“Show us the body/ The thousands of bodies/ And the ones you tried to hide/ That you buried deep in lies”), while elsewhere the restlessness turns back into introspection, taking the form of a bitter contemplation of the wreckage ("Do You Remember").

The music inevitably grows more solemn, even on the seemingly more reflective tracks ("We Don't Go", "Green And Blue"), but the overall impression is of an album that doesn't quite live up to its intentions, to expectations, or to Zedek's talent.

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