Everyone knows that when you turn on a rock station these days, you don’t get musicians playing rock ‘n’ roll, you get a bunch of ponyboys trying to be rock stars. Perhaps a day will come when people will wake, rise up, stop buying Nickelback albums and hang ClearChannel executives from windy ledges until they acknowledge and recant their adulteration of American music. That day, unfortunately, has not yet arrived.
Thankfully, there are bands that still remember what rock truly is, and Marah is just such a band. There is hope in the desert called popular music, because rock is not dead.
The Brooklyn-based quintet’s upcoming release, Angels of Destruction!, is not an album that will receive widespread attention. It doesn’t really have a catchy single to garner airplay, and it won’t be on lots of lists in December because January releases tend to be forgotten and it doesn’t owe a great debt to The Cure, Joy Division or The Talking Heads like the indie sweethearts of most rock journalists. It is an album that has hits and misses and is by no means perfect, but it is an album you should get. Why? Because you’re a red-blooded American and you still like kickyouintheteeth rock and roll, that’s why.
Angels of Destruction! is, in my opinion, Marah’s best effort to date, which is a large cry considering the critical success of 2005’s If You Didn’t Laugh You’d Cry, lauded by Stephen King as best in show for that year. But the permanent addition of Christine Smith on keys has given the band a more complete sound and deeper focus on melody and composition, resulting in songs that stand alone as achievements in musicianship and balladeering, but also work together to form a cohesive thematic tapestry unrivaled in their canon.
After a few seconds of psychedelic Dixieland and a haunting child’s voice, the album spills into abrasive blues riffs and Stonesy backbeats overlaying a strangely pagan chant; a volatile concoction that builds and intensifies into a wailing fireball of sound and lyrical juxtaposition by which Christian iconography and apocalyptic woe come careening toward one another through drunken blankets of noise and smoke. Well, for the first four songs anyway.
The first track, “Coughing Up Blood” exemplifies Marah’s progression as a band. Dave and Serge Bielankos’ vocal styling is much more comfortable, and the writing indicates a preoccupation with Dylan, with lines like “From all the cities I’ve swallowed, I shall be released.” The album opener also expertly plays with tension, adding layers of instrumentation without sounding busy or forced and then offering no solid conclusion to the turmoil created, allowing “Old Time Ticking Away” to springboard away without the burden of further exposition. By the end of track two, the band feels firmly comfortable with the explosive rock they have launched and settle into the rhythmic “Angels on a Passing Train,” the highlight of the first half of the album. A strong, serene melody and assured imagery leads into the blithely catchy chorus and also features the first major contribution by Smith at piano, whose fills provide a striking and pleasant counterpoint. A lesser band may get lazy and stay in this easy mode, but “Wild West Love Song” finds the band stretching their comfort into a snare driven rockabilly, featuring impressive, Allmanesque breaks that deliver yet another powerful chorus atop an electric wail and driving piano licks. The second time around, the precise execution of the pre-chorus break is more developed and intricate, bringing around the Dixieland brass teased in the album’s opening seconds and throwing it under statements like “I hate you for the love you make,” revisiting the opposition of joy and darkness above their resounding clash of breath and guitar. The four opening songs work together to create wild drama and tension, setting up what could have been one of the best rock albums so far this century. Unfortunately, the magic goes only that far, because “Blue But Cool” is one of the worst songs I have ever heard.
Seriously. This is not an exaggeration. It’s terrible. Tracks 1-4 are easily A or even A+ material, but #5 gets a heartfelt F. How could this happen? How could an album take off with such raw power and then nosedive with no apparent cause or warning? I’m not sure, but I know that I had to make myself listen to this song more than once for the sake of this review and now that I have adequate notes I will never listen to it again. Basically, this song appears to be an effort to express a tough-guy alcoholic’s tender desire to “make out” that sounds like it was written by Dirk Diggler in a fit of stilted, fifties pop nostalgia. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, so here’s an actual sampling of lines from this song – “actual” because I can hardly believe that a band as good as Marah would allow lines like this anywhere near them, but here they are:
“Now that we are one, darling, how come we feel more like two than ever?”
“Reeling from a tongue kiss on the outskirts of foreverness.”
“Making out tonight in the changing room of yesterday, my hand up your shirt.”
And you thought I was joking about it being one of the worst songs ever. I would rather listen to Lance Bass sing a poem Michael Bolton wrote for his grandmother than hear this tripe ever again. Moving on.
The next track, “Jesus in the Temple,” is strange, but in a good way: it could have provided a clever shift from the opening, but, in light of “Blue But Cool,” it gets lost in a haze, as it is not strong enough to revive the thick disenchantment brought on by its predecessor. “Santos de Madera” follows and is plainly mediocre. The disillusionment gains steam. At this point I had decided that I would recommend that everyone go online and download songs 1-4 and pretend that Angels of Destruction was an EP. Luckily, the final four tracks regain much of what is lost in the middle of the album, finishing with skill and class.
The denouement begins acoustically with “Songbird,” a solid ballad that offers subtle horn arrangements adding nearly subliminal ambience. More rock and roll follows on the album’s title track, featuring a liberal use of popular convention, but not to its derision. The arrangement and symbolism recall the opening songs, piecing thematic elements back together with deft execution. But these two tracks seem like a mere precursor once “Can’t Take It with You” reaches its full boil. This deceptively mellow ballad is perhaps the best sampling on the entire album, as it is hearkens “Forget the Flowers” and other watermark tracks from Wilco’s alt-country masterpiece Being There. The softly plinking banjo is just within hearing distance behind tasteful clarinet and brass sections, and the chorus features a savvy tension release, accomplished through intelligent construction rather than increased volume. The final song, “Wilderness,” is an 11-minute escapade that rocks out at times and goes through several permutations, including a bagpipe interlude and what sounds like a fuzzy cell phone conversation. In the end, this piece becomes microcosmic of the album as a whole: some parts rock hard, some strangeness abounds and it truly is, more than not, a solid display of talent and should be considered an artistic achievement. So why put in an asinine statement like “My blood became an energy drink, energy became my really good friend!?” That is an awful line and simply does not belong in a song with such great potential: much like “Blue But Cool” and “Santos de Madero” don’t belong on Angels of Destruction!
The Verdict: B
Why a B? Angels of Destruction! is a great rock album from an immensely talented band. Sure, there are some downright horrendous pitfalls, but the album is a fun, interesting listen that demonstrates Marah is ever improving, as the greatness of most of the tracks is undeniable. This is not as uncommon an occurrence as one might think. Just last year Ryan Adams made Easy Tiger, a stellar album, his best since Heartbreaker in my humble though correct opinion, but the song “Halloweenhead” is so terrible I actually deleted it from my iTunes so that I don’t have to go through the trouble of skipping it any more. A simple remedy that will surely work on Angels of Destruction! as well, because the finer points of this album greatly outweigh its miry middle. The title track sums up the experience well: “Angels of destruction, the angel of redemption’s got you beat.”
