Archers of Loaf’s Eric Bachmann Comes Back with Crooked Fingers
Eric Bachmann, I think he’s Crooked Fingers "It’s Like White Despite all "I would Other songs, "The next I’m tempted Crooked Fingers
who used to sing and play guitar in Archers of Loaf, has a quick answer to my
question about whether he considers his new project, Crooked Fingers, to be
experimental music in any way. "I’m not trying to be experimental,"
he says, in a tone that seems surprisingly straight and conversational to me,
given his usual reticence onstage and knack for poetic, opaque lyrics. "I
don’t want to fuck with anybody. I want to communicate."
wrong, though. About being experimental, that is, not about trying to fuck with
people, because trying out new things with music doesn’t mean being pretentious
and screwy and condescending to your audience. In the Archers of Loaf, warped
guitar chords and dense, introspective lyrics never obscured the band’s
objective of making propulsive, muscular rock music that gets people moving
and sweating. With Crooked Fingers, Bachmann seems to be going for something
other than perspiration; the music is mellow and sometimes a little spacey,
but it’s still rooted in the pleasure of rock music, in its ability to
inspire and communicate.
is basically a solo project, recorded and performed with a variety of old friends
as collaborators, and follows a particular stylistic strain in Bachmann’s
oeuvre that he tried out on his two "Barry Black" solo albums and
brought to fruition on the last Archers LP, White Trash Heroes. He’s
discovered that guitars and drums are just one way to make music; there’re
also synthesizers, horns, strings, drum loops. It’s the same thing that
Brian Eno discovered after he left Roxy Music and made albums like Another
Green World and Here Come the Warm Jets, and Peter Gabriel after
Genesis: A rock band is only one way to make music, and it’s a fairly limiting
way. Start fiddling even a little bit with the texture of sound, subtracting
some of the common rock instruments and adding some uncommon ones, slowing this
down, speeding that up, and the gestalt is dramatically changed. Suddenly you
can say all kinds of things you never could before; the music can have a million
purposes instead of just one.
more liberating if it’s just you, if you don’t have to be writing
music for a band," Bachmann says. "You can do whatever you want. You
don’t have to put drums there just because you have a drummer, so that
he won’t be bored just sitting there with nothing to do, or put a guitar
in there just because you have two guitarists."
Trash Heroes or the Barry Black albums, the first, untitled Crooked Fingers
album, on the Warm label, bubbles with instrumental variety and melodic ideas.
There’s still the sound of Fender-through-Fender, but there are also swelling
strings, warbling synths and clicking electronic percussion tracks. Bachmann’s
voice, always a fascinatingly varied instrument, is all over the map, sometimes
sweet and small, sometime unbearably gruff, sometimes nasal and cynical. That’s
true progressive rock: Every instrument, including the voice, is a variable,
though the whole thing never loses sight of being pop. It all goes down smooth.
the care put into the instrumental textures of Crooked Fingers, it’s also,
Bachmann says, the first time he has put lyrics ahead of everything else. The
songs are portraits of people, painted in a somewhat typically oblique Bachmann
way, thoughts about a person rather than a literal description a listener can
visualize. The songs wind up being more meditations on ideas rather than simple
narratives or descriptive couplets.
start writing about a person and then spread it out, make it broader,"
he says. One of the more striking songs on the album is "Black Black Ocean,"
in which Bachmann adopts a growling persona to sing about the wickedness and
inevitability of human apathy, symbolized by a dark sea wave: "Evil lurks
an evil pure/Rising up with an evil cure/To swallow every living thing/Evil
evil entropy." It was written as a nihilistic character sketch, about a
friend of Bachmann’s, but in the process it becomes a scolding of all human
sloth, "criticizing many for the faults of one," as Bachmann says.
like "Under Sad Stars" ("One million stars can’t heat such
a cold cold world"), "Broken Man" ("Cause it’s so hard
to give a damn when you’re a broken man") and "New Drink for
the Old Drunk" ("It’s no crime to resign misery with a bottle"),
stake out similarly dark emotional territory, though the sparkling arrangements
leave a listener with a sense of hope. The album winds down with peaceful, hypnotic
sounds that wash over you like sleep–or a black, black ocean.
one is going to be a little more up-tempo," Bachmann says, though he quickly
adds that the next Crooked Fingers album might very well lean in the exact same
direction: "It’ll have some more dark humor, but hopefully not be
so burdensome and heavy."
to think that the Crooked Fingers’ song on the upcoming tribute to Bruce
Springsteen’s Nebraska is a clue to his continuing interest in haunting,
grim characters: next to contributions by Johnny Cash, Billy Bragg, Los Lobos
and Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Bachmann will sing "Mansion on the Hill,"
Springsteen’s sweet-sour vignette about poor folks’ dreams of wealth,
pleasure and escape. The Springsteen album is due on Sub Pop in early November,
and the next Crooked Fingers album is due sometime next year.
play with the Lilys Sat., Oct. 21, at Brownies, 169 Ave. A (betw. 10th &
11th Sts.), 420-8392.