Emmett and Mary
S/T
Rating: 3.6/5.0
Label: My Idea of Fun
Emmett and Mary have big ideas. And ultimately, unless you live within the tree-lined streets of Johnstown, PA (their hometown and headquarters of My Idea of Fun, by all appearances a very active artists’ collective), S/T is Emmett and Mary’s best chance to telegraph these thoughts out to the world-at-large in one grand, conceptual smartbomb. To say S/T defies description is to oversell it; at the same time, I hesitate to categorize this thing in my hand as a “CD.” It’s arcane and ephemeral, the (by- or after-) product of a process-based philosophy, an oddball artifact – I think the librarians’ cataloging term sound recording suits it best. All of this to say… well, it’s weird.
S/T is a schizophrenic school play, a post-”post” community adaption of Our Town, a bipolar multi-media production that (in my mind’s eye) started out in a third floor bedroom, got organized in neighborhood rec rooms and ended up parading down Main Street in a fit of loosely planned spontaneity. There are well over 30 folks credited as either members of “The Cast” or “The Band,” not to mention a score of others named as “Cult Members.” Not to worry, Emmett and Mary isn’t literally a cult (or is it?); what this gang of collaborators has done on S/T is to braid together post-apocalyptic short story narratives supplied by Christopher Bell with a soundtrack spliced together by Brandon Locher.
For such a wild undertaking (the raw written material of Bell’s short stories exhaustive, the juxtapositioning of sounds in Locher’s auditory collages advanced), it is a minor miracle that S/T doesn’t come off like a bad collaboration between scene-stealing egoists. The lyrics don’t crumble under the weight of plot development; the music doesn’t drown itself out with its own proud cacophony. This is not to say the work doesn’t stumble around at times – the verbal content veers off into self-indulgence (“Like the times I fuck too hard/ Like a superstar/ With a porn star” in “Fanatical Hunting Club”), non sequitur (the unifying phrase “These cars are driving me blind” is threaded throughout the record but never quite resonates in a way that satisfies) or dysfunctional ickiness (“You’re simply beautiful/ I could tie you to a wall and photograph you” particularly spooks in “You’re So Beautiful (Interlude)”). Locher’s use of everything from field recordings to non-musician musicians to spoken word undertones to ramshackle instrumentation makes for a sophisticated interplay of sound, though the simultaneous deployment of too many good ideas sometimes belabors the point. The vocals can get a bit hammy with Locher’s purposely underconfident warbling and Bell’s booming overenunciation; they are, of course, “in character,” but this thing is strange enough without being so deliberate about it. Still, the audiophilac fun of S/T is digging for the beauty in the interference, locating the melody in a medium that assaults the senses. In this pursuit, Bell and Locher could easily be their own worst enemies but they manage to fracture this conceptual musical in a pleasingly contemplative albeit imperfect way.
No doubt the leading men of Emmett an Mary are students of the Jeff Mangum/Beck Hansen (preceding his Devil’s Haircut) school of rock. “Trilogy: Sequel” has a patina of mellow gold with its backwards/forward reverse-talk about such freakishness as “bleeding eyes in their sockets.” And though In the Aeroplane Over the Sea stands alone in its authenticity as a singular masterpiece, S/T is a similar enterprise in that it’s best appreciated as a front-to-back performance piece rather than a collection of isolatable songs. The tracks tick by without any telltale break in continuity; among the most interesting moments are the segues between these song-thoughts. We’re just getting uncomfortable in the disconcerting sparseness of “You’re So Beautiful (Interlude)” when the halting plucking of single strings broadens to a fully strummed chord pattern and gently delivers us to a new motif and mood. And like any self-respecting rock opera, the rising-from-the-rubble finale, “Surveying Revelations,” embraces the soft and lyrical before accelerating into that inevitable, “entire cast” coda in which the very end resembles the very beginning, and vice versa.
S/T is theater for thinkers, a “sound recording” that requires its audience to suspend its iPod Shuffle consciousness in order to make room for an experimental, collectivist work that is almost too indie for “indie.” Though the religio-political story arc of Big Brother/Apocalypse/Age of Aquarius is, at best, (yawn) overplayed and at worst, irrelevant, S/T is rescued by its inherent sincerity of purpose. It’s hard to describe the sound a community makes, but it transmits here with a mindful enthusiasm and a lovable dissonance.
by Stacey Pavlick
Key Tracks: The Summer’s Pull, Surveying Revelations
