Marah

The story goes like this: the newly autonomous Israelites were thirsty after walking through the desert for three days with no water. The Bear Grylls among them were ready to start drinking their own urine when they arrived at a place called Marah. There was water there, but they found out quickly that it was brackish and sour.  Moses, after hearing the people complain about their cruel fate, cried out to the Lord, who showed him a piece of wood to throw into the water, purifying it and rescuing the nation from a tortuous demise.

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.”