Bildungsroman, Progressive Rock and the The Return of Mallory

Here's an admission of bias, the full disclosure:

1. I do not follow most local music, because I find a lot of it too hip, too self satisfied with its own ironic pose, plus I tend to gravitate to dumb rock and roll for a night out, or utter schmaltz, neither of which is in great supply these days, so I really don't go out and check out bands much.
2. Their album the first one hundred years, when taken in conjunction with Camel Lights, Espresso and Adderall, makes paper writing on a graduate level the intellectual stretch it should be, giving one all the bravery they need to go out on a limb and compare De Quincy's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Burrough's Junky as a kind of Camusian story of discovery, the birth of the writer into existence by the act of writing (a success) or querying which is the true sign of A Clockwork Orange? The American Version? The British Version with the extra chapter? Kubrick's rendering (not a success). Or passing the MLA Comps (take God)-the album can help make it happen. There's a blob of espesso on the CD, for crissakes. How long's that been there?
3. Okay...and the guitarist used to sleep on my floor, and I've known the drummer and singer for over ten years.
4. Okay okay...we went to the same High School.

Having said all of that, it is important to note that this Mallory's first opus came out around 2002. We haven't heard from them in quite a while-over two years, by my recollection, since they have rocked out live, for paying enthusiasts.

But Mallory, Matt Arnold, Dan Heier and Jim Cunningham evidentally haven't been cooking up Chinese Democracy or some other self indulgent rock "masterpiece", but instead woodshedding, pondering, inventing- being musicians, in other words.

Self indulgent as an insult may sound like rocks and glass houses with a band that is not only willing to stretch out some, but sounds a bit "prog-y" while they do it, but this is not the case: They won't be "the roundabout".

Instead, what they are is, in effect, a deconstruction of the word progressive, at least in a musical sense: Progressive means forward, and the early progressive bands were Barrett era Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, and The Mothers of Invention-freak rock, if you like.

As the sixties became the seventies, this definition changed, with only Pink Floyd remaining in the definition of Progressive Rock. Noisy and experimental were out. Slick and musicianly were in. Rick Wakeman...RICK FUCKING WAKEMAN...shit salad surgar-y. Nothing weird, just complicated. Nothing too uncomfortable, almost soothing, like valium and red wine, you get kind of lulled into a mellow out complacency... give up grass for tranquilizers and anti-depressents...Soon, you start digging Vangelis, listening to Yanni in the car...burning sage around the house...pan flutes...the horror...

The important thing to remember is that, in this case, Progressive is not Rick Wakeman (Wake Rick, man...). Progressive is The Velvet Underground; noisy poetic dark and uncomfortable. Progressive is The Mothers; the smartest guy in the room calling you an asshole. Progressive is Syd era Floyd; expansive, dense yet spacious, imagistic, druggy. This is the tradition begat the best and most influential bands of rock: The Stooges, Bowie, Roxy Music, Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, nearly everything that can be called Punk or Post Punk, all the early Industrial, from Caberet Voltaire to Psychic TV-experimental, dangerous, music, life affirming, scary art. The other so called progressive music, with its madrigals and masturbatory moog symphonies...Wake Rick, man!

Mallory come from the former tradition. They have no bass player. Dan and Jim work in clouds of sound, which seep and groan out of their instruments, vacillating between monochrome to Kodachrome-shrill to heavy to lighter than air, all in the gravitational pull of Matt Arnold's intuitive expressive percussion, Bonham bombast to brush soft. All three can be found at various times adding a little funereal keyboard, another hue in the enveloping fog.

(Everything orbits everything, or everything orbits the drums, like the Milky Way, though that's not strictly true in every case.)

Mallory is a band that knows the importance of the tradition that begat them, and one can find traces of those bands and artists, yet Mallory recasts these through their own experiences, the secret to working in any artform and not sounding, or looking, like a pastiche. That was always the problem with Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and their ilk: They always looked backwards instead of looking ahead: Their progression was a regression, Rock that is classical but not classic. It's hardly innovative to look to Brahms for inspiration.

Mallory doesn't sound like My Bloody Valentine, for example, but somebody in the band listened-and listened well.

One of the tracks on their first disc was called Bildungsroman, which is one of many taxonomies of biography: The journey of self-discovery, like Rousseau, St. Augustine, etc. One of the ideas I hold near and dear is that, for the artist, every act of creation and capture is the contemporaneous bildungsroman, because every act of creation and capture, be it on canvas, on film, on tape or in the human senses, reflects something a grander tradition while at the same time being a biographical (or autographical) unit reacting to and commenting on what creation came before it- expectation and memory informing this moment, possibly obscuring, the new knowledge, the new chapter. The question is: What came of these "years in the wilderness"? Has Mallory progressed into something even more formidable and special? I have it on good authority that everyone will be mightily impressed. How does this bildungsroman now read?

Friday Night, we find out.

Update: If you want a set list, fuck off.

Unusual for it to be so cool this time of year, and yet, it still managed to be humid for Mallory's first show in ten thousand years, and there were alot of people, with a lot of expectations, for the return of the only original band in Cincinnati.

The pre concert ritual is the same as it has been for generations of rock fans: Meet in bar before the show. Drink beer. Drink beer DRINK BEER. Go to show. There is something comfortable in this ritual, especially around here, because you never know what variety of people you will run into at a local rock show. If they are friends, then, in all likelihood, they will have been doing the same, and it will be a wonderful family reunion. This was the case Friday, as my entire young adult life converged, mightily drunk, to see this show. Mallory, with its ur in greater and lesser Lawrenceburg, Indiana, area, brought every single freak from my hometown out. It was a big happy family reunion, with comedians Brad Thacker, local artist Gene I. Kerley (responsible for the great advertisement), impresario and activist Jon Sheperd, The Deacon of this board, many doobie cruise buddies from back in the day, Mike from the Naked Vine...

The other reason to drink beer before the show was evidenced in a smaller quantities than I expected: Hipsters, people with severe bangs, and thirtysomethings clinging to whatever alternative meant, if it ever meant anything. With these folks in smaller quantities, we were all served up little or self conscious irony, snark, back biting, or any of the other shit that tends to haunt local shows, and has for years. It used to be the "Punker than Thou" Olympics, though now it has morphed into "Hipper than You" Olympics. In either case, this bullshit was at a minimum, thank God, because it allowed for the dark rapture of the music.

In the bildungsroman we call Mallory, the last one thousand years has been fruitful. The first thing that struck me was the sound: Matt Arnold's drums sounded huge, epic, forboding, filling the ballroom of the Southgate with the kind of sledgehammer low end skips your heart a couple of beats. The guitars sounded, well, full, with the space between the parts that Jim Cunningham plays (usuallly the chord-y stuff) and Dan Heier plays(usually melodic and/or noisy stuff) melding into the most gigantic, fucked up chord ever played, a feat I have not witnessed since Fugazi's last trip to Bogart's. Whereas Mallory had been a great rock band before, these years have turned them into a machine: The War of Worlds raising space rock, art rock, psychedelic daydreams and the nightmare of lonely poets from the grave of progressive rock...Wake Rick, man...tell him he sucks and always has...an annihilating derivative, safe, posing, self styled irony rock in its wake. The bands that bookended the show didn't stand a fucking chance. Did I mention that, somehow, Jim Cunningham stole Bill Wyman's bass, and thus, bass guitar showed up for the first time in a Mallory tune?

The lamps were back, glowing red balls of light, but Mallory, this time, brought film. I heard several in the audience quip "Is this a power point presentation. ha ha ha", only to be silenced when, swallowed by the blackhole of the Mallory sound, they also had to deal with a montage of public domain film clips which may, or maynot, elucidated the theme of the song. Or they may have provided counterpoint. Or they may have been a kind of visual tone poem for the song. Either way, the clips chosen were cleverly chosen, stunning to behold, and poignant in a way that sort of transcends description.

Mallory 2007 are pretentious.

Pretentiousness is a word that gets thrown around, yet most people aren't aware of the nuance. Typically, we throw this word around about bloated corporate rock bands, mired in their own importance (see late period Floyd). So convinced are they of their own genius that they assume everything they produce will be absolutely earth shattering, when, in fact, it can be said to be insipidly obvious.

The other definition, which some people might argue is the same thing, is striving for new breakthrough, consciously pushing your art, and it is in this way that great bands are pretentious bands, with each performance, each album, being evolved from its predecessors; Funhouse is better than eponymous debut; White Light/White Heat is better than The Velvet Underground and Nico, and while this isn't always the case, it does illustrate the importance of a band pushing its limits. You should want bands to evolve, and grow, and stop living in some constructed past. Some bands are pretentious, and pull it off. Don't confuse this with that shit Jack White puts out now, or worse, that horrible ersatz post punk bullshit...Going for it...no bullshit...no pose...getting out on the limb...the canvas widens...highwire...dangerous and uncompromising...

This is the fucking real thing, folks...