Feelies

1976, Haledon – New Jersey (USA): Bill Million and Glenn Mercer are two ordinary kids, two middle-class students. Both play guitar, both want to start a band. Their idols are the Velvet Underground, the Byrds, the Beatles, the Stones. Their aim is to reread the past in light of the present; their desire is to experiment with the song form, keeping in mind the lesson of Television (but also of the Modern Lovers).

Their first band was called Outkids: Glenn played guitar and Bill played bass. Something, though, wasn't quite right… That same fateful year, the two met Keith Clayton (bass) and Vinnie DeNunzio (drums). Bill picked up a second guitar, while Dave Wackerman, who had drummed in Outkids, switched to percussion. Glenn and Bill saw that it was good, and named it "Feelies". They debuted in 1977, complete with an article in the Village Voice, which called them "New York's best underground band". In 1978, fate decreed that Anton Fier (already a veteran of the seminal Electric Eels) would take Vinnie DeNunzio's place on drums. Sometimes fate does things in style.

Not long after, our heroes, having signed with Stiff, began thinking about their debut album. In the meantime, they amused themselves with stunning covers of songs by the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones and others (a field in which they still have very few rivals today…). A couple of years later, "Crazy Rhythms" was born, a "deranged" masterpiece of guitar-driven art-rock that updates the Television lesson for the post-punk era, venturing into mysterious, ambiguous territory.

Anton Fier: here's the name of one of the greatest drummers of all time. It's his nervous, syncopated, at times disjointed "touch" that gives the Feelies sound its first flash of genius. The second stroke of genius comes from the perfect alchemy between Mercer's and Million's guitars: as with the celebrated Verlaine-Lloyd partnership, the chords chase each other, copulate in ecstasy, and vanish. Put the two together, and you get one of the greatest masterpieces of new wave.

The first stick of dynamite, "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness", takes about a minute (a crescendo of chords and percussion like a heartbeat) before exploding into a spastic, android tribalism: a surface that's fiery, nervous, frantically straining towards an improbable catharsis. And that sound of guitars gone mad: crystalline, disorienting, swirling. Like lovers repeatedly consummating their passion in a bed of flowers. Faced with the blazing "Fa Cè-La", one gets the impression that the Feelies are aiming for a kind of "abstraction" of sound. The whole record is draped in a destabilizing veil of torment and anxiety. Miles away from the fires of punk, "Crazy Rhythms" nonetheless retains a very particular "wild" charge. It's the same schizoid drive that characterized the early Talking Heads (especially the "More Songs About Buildings And Food" era): the difference is that the Feelies channeled every trace of instinctual force into the grooves of an anemic, glacial musical synthesis, in which, though, it's precisely the "rational" elements that seem, through some sinister force, to magically take on "irrational" overtones.

"Loveless Love", introduced by minimal chord sequences and Fier's Maureen Tucker-style drumming, lays out a sort of avant-la-lettre, post-punk theorem of "math-rock", yet eroded from within by that same anxious vein. In the finale, a rapid up-and-down run on the six-string dissolves into a brief impressionistic passage of drifting electronics, which, in the next track ("Forces At Work"), sets things up perfectly for the "locomotive" impact of the drums and the dizzying eruptions of guitar. As in Roxy Music's "If There Is Something", the song is reshaped "on the fly", without the rhythm section changing in the slightest. Mercer's solo is a caress to the heart: unforgettable. The schizophrenic "jingle-jangle" of "Original Love" (with small "deviant" percussive touches from Fier) collides violently with the frantic cover of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except From Me And My Monkey)" (from the "White Album"): the emphasis falls mostly on the guitar's strumming and on the rhythm. "Moscow Nights" opens in a display of subliminal chords and micro-solos that are like diaphanous lines against a smoke-black sky. Then it launches into another imperious progression, right up to the final guitar note, stretched to the breaking point: exhausted.

The band's most distinctly "instrumental" and experimental side comes through on the last two tracks. First, "Raised Eyebrows": from Fier's nervous bursts on the "random tom-toms" to Mercer's on the "spasmodic drum", passing through Mercer's own "treated" guitar chords, right up to the epic finale with rhythm guitar (Million) and the whole gang howling "oh-oh" at the top of their lungs: a gem that is, needless to say, "disorienting". The rhythms of the title track are, obviously, "crazy". The effect is that of a psychedelic jam: while the drums (and the various percussion) build a rock-solid bed, the guitars sketch out harmonies and dis-harmonies, in an increasingly austere layering game that is, ultimately, ever more irrational, imaginative and sublime (worth noting that the 1986 CD reissue also includes an excellent cover of the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black").

By reviving a folk-rock guitar sound (the Byrds above all) within rhythmic structures that are, to say the least, complex and jagged (yet which still connect back to the minimalist "trances" of the Velvet Underground and the "motorik" pulse of Neu!), the Feelies coined one of the most original, daring and spectacular musical languages of their time. Which, of course (!?!), condemned them to anonymity in New York's underground.

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29/10/2006