Guest Blogger: Sean Wilsey

Sean Wilsey loves The Airborne Toxic Event, a band he mercifully calls TATE. If you want to know how TATE might lead you to think about the song "Cat's in the Cradle," I suggest you continue reading. Thank you, Sean, for graciously contributing to Monitor Mix.

Back in September, Carrie was busy and asked for some blog help. Now, months later, this is no help at all -- but here are some thoughts about a band I've been unable to stop listening to, The Airborne Toxic Event.

The ridiculous name apparently comes from a Don DeLillo novel, and I first heard one of the band's songs, "Sometime Around Midnight," on the radio last spring, while I was driving my mom's minivan through Los Angeles. The lyrics reminded me of one of my candidates for worst song ever to become a semi-classic -- Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," a maudlin ballad about a sexy criminal's seduction methods, which include telling a woman, "Red hair and black leather / That's my favorite color scheme" before his deathbed bequeathal of a motorcycle to said leather-clad redhead: "And he gave her one last kiss and died / And he gave her his Vincent to ride." What filled Mom's minivan was equally overblown and absurd, yet somehow irresistible. The band seemed to have channeled this same strain of adolescent self-seriousness, but remained fun to listen to. (Thompson's song makes me want to stop living.)

TATE is a five-piece band, with a single female member (the violinist), and in "Sometime Around Midnight" it's the woman who makes the first move: "She walks up and asks how you are / So you can smell her perfume / You can see her lying naked in your arms."

There's some kind of hookup in the next few lines, but things plummet messily downhill until "you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine." Soon she ends it: "Then she leaves, with someone you don't know / But she makes sure you saw her / She looks right at you and bolts / As she walks out the door, your blood boiling your stomach in ropes / Oh, and when your friends say, 'What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost!' "

This ghost line, delivered with such vocal-cord-sawing angst, made me laugh hard enough to park and listen to the rest. I am in awe of any pure, unembarrassed, artistic outpouring of portent and longing and romanticism that doesn't let you know if it is or isn't aware of its own absurdity. I love trying to figure out if a song is serious, and if that makes me like it more or less. The ending of "Sometime Around Midnight" convinced me they were winking: "Then you walk, under the streetlights / And you're too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you / You just don't care what you look like, the world is falling around you / You just have to see her / You just have to see her / You just have to see her / You just have to see her / You just have to see her / You know that she'll break you in two."

Most writers indulge in self-seriousness, but my favorite ones have outgrown it (Conor Oberst on his last two albums), while others just move more deeply and disappointingly into it (Liz Phair on her last two albums). Without a pen, I ended up calling my own answering machine to leave myself a message with the band's name and some of the lyrics. This seemed to be in the proper self-involved spirit. Since then, I've listened to the album constantly, and it's the sound, not the lyrics (though I remember that a sticker on the CD case said something like "poetry you can dance to"), that keeps me addicted: ventriloquistic, sometimes channeling The National, sometimes U2, sometimes The Jam, shifting around so much that you can't call what the band's doing derivative. It's more ADD than kleptomania.

Also, up on YouTube, is a series of acoustic versions that reinvent the whole album:

Anyway, it's the total, self-centered romanticism that I find transcendently awesome. For more of this, here's Peter Murphy's Bauhaus:

And Andrew Eldridge (long lead-in, but worth it for the lyrics):

And, in a completely different style, Harry Chapin:

And, just to take things to an ultimate extreme, William Shatner (covering "Taxi," also by Chapin):

I didn't know he did stuff like that.

As for Richard Thompson, I just looked him up and found this, which I kind of like (the beret's a nice touch, and he can definitely play guitar):

In the comments section for this video, a fan writes, "If I tried I could not better express my passion for motorcycles and redheads better than this. What a privilege it is to share life with someone as gifted as Richard Thompson." But I hate the song. And I love The Airborne Toxic Event.

This all seems like a genre to me. Not sure what to call it.

--Sean Wilsey

2:22 AM ET | 01-29-2009 | permalink

comments |