Don Caballero

Today we're certainly no strangers to the idea that music can originate from – or even be in the first instance – a concept. And if we turn our gaze to the second half of the 20th century in America, one of the most explosive periods from an artistic standpoint, the convergence between these two planes – expressive and ideological – has become almost a cliché. But without retracing, not even partially, the cultural upheavals of postwar America, let's just take a look at the small (though hugely influential) story of the Touch And Go label in the early '90s.

Steve Albini's tight-knit entourage had already witnessed the fleeting passage of Slint and the launch of David Yow's grotesque Jesus Lizard. By 1993 we're just a step away from the nihilistic manifesto of Shellac, but before that comes the debut of Don Caballero, a band led by virtuoso drummer Damon Che Fitzgerald and guitar prodigy Ian Williams. The latter is unmistakably someone who's studied his craft – even if self-taught – and who, judging by the statements he made in interviews at the time, had a pretty clear idea of the meaning and purpose behind what he was doing in his various projects.

Don Caballero's first three albums represent as many progressive stages of a surgical operation performed on the dead body of punk-hardcore. Even on the debut, "For Respect", unlike Shellac's blind fury, there's already a considerable detachment in the practice of dissecting a series of muscular riffs with extreme diligence. But the decisive turn happens between the second and third albums: on one hand we have the closing track of "2", an almost slavish application of the phasing technique devised by Steve Reich – one of Williams's primary sources of inspiration – and on the other, following that same logic, its ideal continuation ("Don Caballero 3"), which opens on the very same rhythm that closed the previous record; it's here that those patterns, which formed the founding element of the tracks from 1995, undergo a metamorphosis, suddenly becoming autonomous, autistic entities on "What Burns Never Returns".

The rules guiding this process aren't ironclad; they carve their way through a multiform schematism bordering on psychasthenia, capable of making us believe we're hearing an impro session rather than the offspring of a perversely calculating mind. The melodic cells, often shot through with irritating dissonances, no longer seem like the passive instrument serving an elaborate structural design, but rather objects endowed with a life of their own, free to forge ever bolder connections between themselves. As Williams himself put it: "Don Cab uses the logic of the machine, even if we try to program it to behave in a way that makes you think it shouldn't be a machine. […] And its development has followed roughly that of computer chips – getting faster and smaller." How, after all, can one not sense the friction between exclusively "analog" instrumentation and the neurotic tension of the codes belonging to a digital age still in fieri?

Che's overflowing drumming and the crisp bass lines are only the occasional lifeline of a framework otherwise governed by a logic all its own: the definitive essay on this is "From The Desk Of Elsewhere Go", whose structure limps and slackly collapses on itself like a lame robot stumbling and picking itself back up with every step, seeking its own continuity in the almost hardcore drive of the rhythm section.

The nervy distortions edge toward metal territory, especially in the deceptive theme of "Delivering The Groceries At 138 Beats Per Minute", which in no time splits between the guitars into a disorienting stereophony: it's the embryonic stage of the interplay we'll find again almost a decade later on "Mirrored", developed across the three guitars of an even more compact line-up.

Beyond the legacy of minimalism, what resurfaces here is the prophetic roar of King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues In Aspic", whose historical scope, far ahead of rock's own developmental curve, can never be praised enough: in Williams's architectures a similar balance endures between contorted invention and instrumental excitement, as if to say emotional detachment doesn't preclude physical and cerebral engagement; Don Cab's frenzied rhythmic work always keeps intact a taste for a mechanism that invites your concentration without demanding it, a highbrow entertainment with few equals amid the darkness of the '90s.

We're looking at the probable ideological and qualitative peak of math-rock as commonly understood, a label that, despite the thrilling and unpredictable developments of the following decade, would take on an almost derogatory connotation among listeners less accustomed to it. Still, there's a kernel of good sense in rejecting the excesses that can result from relying on such rigid, invariable schemes: Williams himself, having perhaps reached the outer limit with Don Cab and its proto-Dadaist echo Storm And Stress, would attempt his "redemption" through the multicolored monstre Battles, with equally mad and technically accomplished musicians (including scion Tyondai Braxton) but devoted to a playfulness that had until then been avoided.

In all likelihood, one further step toward "What Burns Never Returns" – an admirable work of "lexical" destructuring – would have brought crashing down a framework that was already extremely vertiginous: for skeptics, the invitation is to view the whole from a certain distance, like an intricate electrical circuit that, seen from afar, reveals both its internal coherence and its own subtle aesthetic charm; for everyone else, there remains the pleasure of untangling a sophisticated algebraic expression that will never give you impossible as its result.

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12/04/2015