If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a mystery. Did D.B. Cooper survive his jump from Northwest Orient Airlines’ Flight 305 into a 200-mph wind on the rainy, pitch-black night of November 24, 1971? Why does Wile. E. Coyote continue to use ACME products, when they’re obviously subpar and don’t meet even the most minimal consumer safety standards? Why, on Bewitched, did Darren insist that Samantha not use her powers? When any sane man would have said, “I’d like a million dollars in small unmarked bills, the guest room filled to my Adam’s apple with high-grade pharmaceutical cocaine, and a bigger dick. A much, much bigger dick.”
This is the reason Clem Snide’s Birthing Pains drove me so wild. It was released this year, but I wasn’t able to find out zilch about it. It’s not mentioned on Clem Snide’s web site or listed on Wikipedia, and good luck discovering a review of it online. You can buy the damn thing, but just try finding anything out about it. You’d have an easier time finding D.B. Cooper.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have cared if Birthing Pains sounded even remotely like the Clem Snide I know, which copped its name from a William Burroughs character and produces a highly intelligent and frequently melancholy hybrid of country, folk, pop, and restrained rock’n’roll. But it doesn’t. I listened to it once, twice, and a third time and was still convinced some type of mistake had been made, and that the music on Birthing Pains had been made by somebody else, this despite the fact that the words “Clem Snide” were right there on the album cover.
Because the cold hard fact is that amidst Clem Snide’s amazingly consistent body of work since 1998 (which includes at least 12 LPs and 4 EPs including 2002’s brilliant Moment in the Sun, 1999’s lovely Your Favorite Music, and 2011’s wonderful “Clem Snide Journey” EP, which consists solely of breathtakingly original covers of Journey songs), Birthing Pains sticks out like a Hell’s Angel at a Mormon wedding.
Why? Because it’s utterly deranged, that’s why. It sounds like, I don’t know, the Cortortions’ James Chance and the late Robert Quine decided to get together and play the most berserk, fucked-up rock’n’roll they could dream up. Gone—as gone as D.B. Cooper—are the slow and sublimely beautiful alt-country songs, replaced by frenetic tempos, feverish blasts of squawking sax, sinuous guitar lines as thin and sharp as razor wire, herky-jerky rhythms, one super-distorted bass, lots of punishing drum pummel, and helter-skelter vocals by some guy who claims to be Clem Snide singer, guitarist, and mastermind Eef Barzelay but doesn’t sound anything like him. The results are vaguely akin to no wave, except that Barzelay’s songs, while big on the caterwaul, still retain his knack for melody.
It’s a bona fide mystery, Birthing Pains, but I’m happy to report the mystery is solved, thanks to Barzelay and on-and-off drummer Eric Paull, both of whom were kind enough to respond to my desperate pleas for enlightenment. As it turns out, Birthing Pains is not a new Clem Snide album, but rather an artifact from the band’s beginnings in Boston in the early 90s. According to Paull, the album’s songs were recorded “in a kitchen, a recording studio, some may be live as well.” He added, “Birthing Pains was never “released” because it was never an album as such.”
Said Barzelay, “These seven [songs on Birthing Pains] are like a “best of” from that era,” and represent what Clem Snide sounded like “as miserable angst-ridden 20 somethings.” He added, “It’s weird for me to listen to now and very much feels like another person is singing.” When I asked Barzelay why the LP wasn’t released until now, he responded simply, “Not sure really. I guess I’m a real “don’t look back” kinda dude.”
Barzelay called the band’s early approach to making music “group therapy,” adding, “Someone would just start playing some phrase and we would just jump on it. We wordlessly aspired to make it gnarly.” He added that the band was listening to “Captain Beefheart, Slint, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Marc Ribot, Tom Waits, Bone Machine, and all the grunge stuff so that’s how it came out. None of us thought at the time we would take it to the next level and get more professional with it.”
Barzelay moved to New York in 1994 with Birthing Pains bassist Jason Glasser and saxophonist Bill Grabek. It was there, Barzelay told me, the band developed its radically new sound, one “based much more around my slow and shaky country-ish songs.” In short, Clem Snide pulled a Meat Puppets I and II, abandoning cacophony for country, and never looked back. And it’s hard to second guess Barzelay’s sudden shift in direction when one hears such quintessentially lovely and timeless songs as “Moment in the Sun,” “Your Favorite Music,” “I Love the Unknown,” “Better,” and “No One’s More Happy Than You.” Still, Birthing Pains is a revelation, and one can’t help but wish that Barzelay had been able to bifurcate himself somehow, and continue to play both his beloved alt-country and the remarkable noise rock of Birthing Pains.
Birthing Pains opens with the clash and clamor of “Rock and Roll,” a frenetic stop-and-starter that introduces itself with some blasts of Barzelay’s guitar followed by a short series of horn squawks by Grabek. It features Barzelay, accompanied by some fantastically distorted bass by Glasser, shouting “Round and round and round and round,” a woman who comes from out of nowhere to utter a short something or other, and lots of follow-the-leader, with Barzelay playing a short, jarring burst of discordant noise, followed by Grabek doing the same. Then the song comes to a false stop, which is promptly followed by some primitive sax blasts by Grabek, after which Barzelay and Grabek set to producing one tumultuous ruckus. Then Barzelay once again starts shrieking “Round and round and round and round!” before the song comes to an end not with a bang but a single, very out-of-kilter, sax honk.
The blatant Dinosaur Jr. rip “Let’s Just Pretend” is the album’s sole disappointment. Grabek’s sax is missing in action and as for Barzelay, he’s content to play power chords while imitating Mascis’ stoner slur, and what you’re left with is a nice melody that has the initials J.M. embroidered on it, just like the bath towels in J.’s purple-fur-walled master bathroom. (I’ve been there. Not only won’t Mascis let you use his monogrammed towels, but his “guest” towels are, I swear, made from a very coarser grade of sand paper.) That said, Paull’s drumming is swell; at one point he sounds exactly like a guy hammering nails! A pity, really, because those nails could have been put to better use than nailing together the lackluster “Let’s Just Pretend.” Speaking just for myself, I’d buy a nail gun and use them to take pot shots at Sufjan Stevens. With any luck, I’d hit him right in the wimp glands.
“Important” opens with pure dead brilliant drumming, some background saxophone honk, and a brief monologue by Martin Paul. Then Barzelay frantically launches into, to the accompaniment of some rapacious sax and guitar tumult, about how he wants to be important, and hear his voice on the radio, and his vocals grow more agitated until they’re interrupted by a mighty pounding din by Paull, then some very twitch-inducing guitar scribbles and atonal sax skronk. After the second verse (which is punctuated by great blasts of guitar and sax) the song comes to a slow, jack-hammering standstill, after which Grabek makes like Albert “The Holy Ghost” Ayler, and Barzelay follows up with a staccato guitar solo so piano-wire thin you could use it to strangle your Mafioso enemies, of whom I have two, Angelo “Fat Bird” Marcucci and Tony “Tasty Bananas” DeFeo, both of whom are figments of my imagination. Then Barzelay returns to screaming about how he wants to be important, and so the song ends.
“Roadkill” opens with a blast of free jazz and moves very very fast, stopping only long enough to let Barzelay sing, well, something while Grabek plays a cool repetitive riff on his trusty saxophone. Then Barzelay and Grabek hook up to make some cool noise, after which Grabek produces some Phoaroh “I can play two saxes at once” squonk and the NASCAR pace resumes. Barzelay sings some, then he and Grabek hook up again to play some tumultuous stop and start, only to set off to make a completely different species of din, and it makes you wonder how many kinds of din are there, anyway? Meanwhile Barzelay repeats “On the side of the road” before the guitar and sax hook up again and take off at a bebop pace, as if in a race for the finish line.
“Car” is a very different animal from the rest of the album. A slow and ominous song about an abduction told in the first person by Barzelay, it opens with some great hollow-sounding drums, after which Barzelay sings, “Don’t breathe so hard/Walk slow don’t turn around/Get in my car/Face flat lay on the ground.” Then Grabek comes in with a great honking riff, followed by a demonically possessed solo by Barzelay that fits perfectly with the song’s tone of omnipresent menace. Then Barzelay sings some more, while Grabek returns to that syncopated sax riff, which segues into a guitar-sax caterwaul that just gets wilder and wilder, with Grabek turning his sax inside out while Barzelay plays a long, blistering and fractured solo composed of notes so sharp and razor-thin you could use them to shave. Then comes the sound of a car starting up and driving away, and you know this is one story that doesn’t end well.
The mid-tempo “Tell Me Something” opens with some funky bass, cool percussion, and a few farting sax blurts, then Barzelay comes in playing great squalls of distorted guitar. “Tell me something/Tell me something I don’t know,” he deadpans, while playing random blasts of guitar, with Grabek tossing in the occasional honk and holler. Then the song takes off for a dizzying spin, which ends with Grabek playing a prolonged note on the sax. “Beat me somewhere/Beat me somewhere it’ll show,” Barzelay moans, as the song dissolves into a cacophonous but funky mix of guitar, sax, and drums, after which Barzelay repeats, “Tell Me Something/Tell me something” as Grabek honks away on the sax and the song comes to an end.
Album closer “Seem” is one non-stop barrage of guitar and sax noise, and with the exception of a brief drum breakdown at the halfway point, never lets up for an instant. It opens with one very fucked-up sounding guitar, then explodes into a herky-jerky rhythm, with Barzelay playing jagged shards of guitar noise while Grabek adds to the background noise. Meanwhile Barzelay sings about a girl “who gathers up her belongings/She likes to keep them nice and clean,” before letting loose with a heavily distorted ascending guitar riff. Which is followed by some herky-jerky stop and start, during which Barzelay fires off a gonzo series of twisted riffs. Then the song dissolves into a series of mini-crescendos of guitar and sax, producing a noise I’ve never heard by anybody, not even Cows, before the song comes to an abrupt end.
It’s as interesting as it is pointless to ponder what might have been had Barzelay not taken his sudden detour into alt-country. The band that produced Birthing Pains was definitely on to something, as much as they tend to downplay the album as a product of their “angst-ridden” youth. I don’t think they sound like Captain Beefheart, Slint, Fugazi, or any of the other bands Barzelay mentions. Birthing Pains sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and what I hear when I listen to it is rock’n’roll at its wildest, weirdest, and best. It may have been recorded in the early nineties but it sounds completely fresh to my ears, and I’d sooner listen to it than the likes of Slint, Fugazi, or even Tom Waits (guy drives me nuts) any day.
Like D.B. Cooper—and all great vanishing acts, plane hijackers and musicians alike—the embryonic Clem Snide took a blind leap into 200-mph winds in the Bible black of a stormy night only to disappear forever, leaving behind a great album that has, like the packets of decomposed Cooper ransom money an 8-year-old discovered on the banks of Washington’s Columbia River in 1980, at long last turned up. That money was still good, and so is this album. Did I say good? I meant great. Check it out.
