If you have occasional fond thoughts of 90s art rock bands like the Monks of Doom you may also recall, while waxing nostalgic about the dear old 1990s, that there was a golden moment, after the commercial breakthrough of punk/grunge/indie rock in America but before the advent of Napster, when bands that had been toiling in musical nether regions for years finally had their moments in the sun. The MoD were an offshoot of Camper Van Beethoven, the most palatably inventive American band of the 1980s and early 1990s, and like the great Camper Van approached American prog — delegated generally and unfortunately to the backwater of “jam” band categorization — with a firm belief that dumping every damn thing they could think of into the musical kettle and bringing it all to boil would work. And it mostly did. We’re talking about music that went deeply into the spirit of blues and other “ethnic” musics as processed through Roky Erickson, Captain Beefheart and, later, performance art bands like Butthole Surfers and the Flaming Lips, a twisted and distinctly American edge-of-the-frontier wildness that would make a great novel if Cormac McCarthy ever chose to write it. In the pages of Progarchy I’ve before referenced the spectacular Metal Flake Mother out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who sailed these same waters and with the same ethic in the 90s, and my notion is that regionally there were many bands following a similar path, nodding to the blues, jazz, European folk, surf guitar, 50s lounge music, Tom Waits, and punk all at the same time, as if the real guitar heroes in the room were Django Reinhardt, Marc Ribot, Dick Dale, and Sonny Sharrock. In the post-punk pre-internet age, these bands sold records, sometimes lots of records, and could sustain careers lasting, well, months.
Pillage and Plunder brought this short-lived and extremely satisfying era to life when I spun up their new record, The Show Must Go Wrong, for the first time. Mixing an eclectic take on Belew-era Crimson with an Esquivel-via-Cake loungeyness, Pillage and Plunder map a journey that’s less highway than exit ramps, and across its 35 minutes The Show Must Go Wrong takes every possible detour, sightseeing on the outskirts of modern music. The breathtakingly inventive “Beetlejuice” opens the record, with its furious and metallic nod to prime Oingo Boingo, and with “Boogeyman” the music maintains its carnival-esque darkness, backed by big riffs and chops. “How Did It Come To This?” follows, and the album turns in mood, which got me to thinking that the precocious musicianship here on display presents a problem for Pillage and Plunder, though it’s not a bad problem to have: while the songs are composed and concise (a big plus), as an album The Show Must Go Wrong comes at times dangerously close to living up to its title, as it suffers at points from a lack of curatorial will in favor of showcasing musical dexterity, favoring breadth over depth. So the promise of sideways-tilting, reach-deep, dark humor at the top of the album — and revisited in such songs as the excellent “Moocow” and “Nutcracker” — turns into an occasionally studied oddball-ness as the record unfolds. But it’s a small complaint for the kind of record this is supposed to be, not to mention that the songs have a way of turning themselves into earworms that simply will not leave the head and hum alone. Check for instance, “I Will Drink The Ocean When I Go There,” which premieres here on Progarchy: LISTEN HERE…
