Brainiac

I am a cracked machine

I am a guide wire hussy

I am your favorite DJ

A blip on the screen

It all ended on the night of May 23, 1997, when Tim Taylor and his forest-green 1977 Mercedes, bought just five days earlier, crashed into a lamppost near North Main Street in Dayton, Ohio. The singer, keyboardist and guitarist of Brainiac, only twenty-eight years old, had recently played Lollapalooza and had just come off a surprising tour with Beck. Timmy, as everyone called him, was the son of cellist Linda Taylor and jazz guitarist Terry Taylor. But above all, he was the soul of Brainiac, the band formed in 1992 that also included Juan Monasterio (bass), Tyler Trent (drums) and, from 1994 on, John Schmersal (guitar, keyboards, vocals), who had taken over from Michelle Bodine.

Brainiac died too in the crash that cursed night. There was no way to reform the band, at least not until 2023. With Timmy gone, so too vanished the dream of carrying on an experience that had, until then, been wonderfully crazy and therefore utterly unrepeatable.

Brainiac turned everything and its opposite inside out with a Dadaist stew, letting industrial parodies, synth-punk and new wave run riot across the field. Songs that were often nothing short of demented first emerged in all their absurd glory on "Bonsai Superstar", released in 1994 - the album with which the Dayton band effectively set aside the punk urges surfaced in 1992 on their debut, "Smack Bunny Baby" - and two years later on the masterpiece "Hissing Prigs In Static Couture".

The band also liked to call itself 3RA1N1AC, and even the song titles appeared mutated, evoking the power of mirror-writing on the human brain. A choice in keeping with the group's surrealist spirit, devised to show that, deep down, Brainiac's music was nothing but an upside-down mirror, shattered into a hundred thousand pieces, of that thing good-naturedly called rock.

An organized chaos, then, but chaos nonetheless, in which the revival of certain canons becomes an excuse to indulge in the hammiest kind of madness. Need some reference points? Picture the Cramps having dinner with Man or Astro-Man?, the latter a twin band to Brainiac if it weren't for their closer ties to Californian surf-rock. Or maybe Pere Ubu climbing into the ring to take on Jesus Lizard and Devo in a Royal Rumble booked by Ric "Nature Boy" Flair. There: only with these outlandish tableaux might you get a sense, perhaps, of what the Brainiac mirage actually was.

The band's style, however bizarre, follows in the wake of early-90s noise-rock, but bends its structure and shape whenever it pleases, stretching it like a spring to fling it back and forth through time, with sudden raids into adjacent genres like psychobilly or synth-funk. An all-consuming jumble. A fruit salad of deviations, in which Timmy's synth is the rudder used to steer this way and that, depending on the moment. The dadaist dance of "Hissing Prigs In Static Couture" proves that roughing up the past with healthy fury can still, somehow, fuel a certain kind of future. Not bad, right?

The curtain comes down regardless with "Pussyfootin'," a deranged cabaret number in which the sex act takes on the guise of a taunt "melodically" propped up by noisy flourishes and killer riffs, duly fired off somewhere toward the Moon, setting up the electroshock-style rampage of "Vincent Come On Down," with Timmy's filtered little voice echoing like a deranged cyborg barking orders, as if he were a nurse in some abandoned asylum on a hill somewhere in Ohio.

Even in the more "accessible," or rather "seated," moments, like "This Little Piggy," Brainiac keep charging ahead in their cathartic invective against the whole universe, having a blast without letup thanks to solos that stab in every direction and unspecified fits of delirium.

This little piggy, is locked in a vault

Hates light, Sunlight

Hides in the daytime, comes out after dusk

Ooh ooh, scares you

I could huff and I could puff and blow your stick house down

Flatter than flat, imagine the sound

Should I go easy? Forgive and forget? No    

Darkness falls like panting, heroin-addled jesters on "Strung." Monasterio's bass is lopsided this time, as if forced onto methadone for a while. "Hissing Prigs In Static Couture" is, for the most part, an operetta impossible to decode, genre tags aside. Take, for instance, the ghosts sent to the scrapyard in the electronic waltz that would make even the most disturbed Reznor turn pale over the scant two minutes of "The Vulgar Trade," or the neurosis staged in "Beekeepers Maxim," which delivers a sort of out-of-control noise march that tips over into sheer bravado, amid the relentless contortions that keep popping up as ever.

Restlessness is the strong suit of a record that stands essentially as a unicum in the English-language art-rock landscape of the '90s. Throughout, Brainiac seem like four indomitable toy soldiers firing wildly into the dark of an existential ravine, out of which demons and clowns (re)emerge upside down.

The most blinding gems of this script arrive toward the end, namely "Nothing Ever Changes," a track the best Ween would kill for, and above all "I Am A Cracked Machine," Brainiac's manifesto and the emblem of what they might have become, a genuine volley fired to the four winds by the android Timmy's raucous vocals, lost amid math-rock stop-and-go and false starts. It's the closing of a circle that dissolved into the sky of American alternative rock, vibrating like a cloud charged with electricity beyond belief.

After Timmy's death, Schmersal moved to New York to form John Stuart Mill, with whom he released the 1999 album "Forget Everything," a title that is clearly nomen omen for a very specific need, while the songs occasionally picked back up Brainiac's dadaism. An attempt that continued on and off under the alias Enon as well.

The original lineup, however, unexpectedly reappeared in 2019, shortly after the release of a documentary, "Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero," chronicling the glory days of the Dayton band. "Going back in my mind to those times was truly cathartic," were Schmersal's first words in a phone interview with the New York Times. And further: "When the band broke up, we all scattered like ants suddenly put under a magnifying glass. Seeing each other again now, we realized how much we loved our friendship, which was sadly cut short by the death of our friend Timmy." Words followed by an unhoped-for reunion, which also produced an EP, released in 2024, "The Predator Nominate E.P.," containing nine new songs that Brainiac played live on a celebratory tour.

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23/02/2025