Archers of Loaf's Eric Bachmann Comes Back with Crooked Fingers
Eric Bachmann, who used to sing and play guitar in Archers of Loaf, has a quick answer to my question about whether he considers his new project, Crooked Fingers, to be experimental music in any way. "I'm not trying to be experimental," he says, in a tone that seems surprisingly straight and conversational to me, given his usual reticence onstage and knack for poetic, opaque lyrics. "I don't want to fuck with anybody. I want to communicate."
I think he's wrong, though. About being experimental, that is, not about trying to fuck with people, because trying out new things with music doesn't mean being pretentious and screwy and condescending to your audience. In the Archers of Loaf, warped guitar chords and dense, introspective lyrics never obscured the band's objective of making propulsive, muscular rock music that gets people moving and sweating. With Crooked Fingers, Bachmann seems to be going for something other than perspiration; the music is mellow and sometimes a little spacey, but it's still rooted in the pleasure of rock music, in its ability to inspire and communicate.
Crooked Fingers is basically a solo project, recorded and performed with a variety of old friends as collaborators, and follows a particular stylistic strain in Bachmann's oeuvre that he tried out on his two "Barry Black" solo albums and brought to fruition on the last Archers LP, White Trash Heroes. He's discovered that guitars and drums are just one way to make music; there're also synthesizers, horns, strings, drum loops. It's the same thing that Brian Eno discovered after he left Roxy Music and made albums like Another Green World and Here Come the Warm Jets, and Peter Gabriel after Genesis: A rock band is only one way to make music, and it's a fairly limiting way. Start fiddling even a little bit with the texture of sound, subtracting some of the common rock instruments and adding some uncommon ones, slowing this down, speeding that up, and the gestalt is dramatically changed. Suddenly you can say all kinds of things you never could before; the music can have a million purposes instead of just one.
"It's more liberating if it's just you, if you don't have to be writing music for a band," Bachmann says. "You can do whatever you want. You don't have to put drums there just because you have a drummer, so that he won't be bored just sitting there with nothing to do, or put a guitar in there just because you have two guitarists."
Like White Trash Heroes or the Barry Black albums, the first, untitled Crooked Fingers album, on the Warm label, bubbles with instrumental variety and melodic ideas. There's still the sound of Fender-through-Fender, but there are also swelling strings, warbling synths and clicking electronic percussion tracks. Bachmann's voice, always a fascinatingly varied instrument, is all over the map, sometimes sweet and small, sometime unbearably gruff, sometimes nasal and cynical. That's true progressive rock: Every instrument, including the voice, is a variable, though the whole thing never loses sight of being pop. It all goes down smooth.
Despite all the care put into the instrumental textures of Crooked Fingers, it's also, Bachmann says, the first time he has put lyrics ahead of everything else. The songs are portraits of people, painted in a somewhat typically oblique Bachmann way, thoughts about a person rather than a literal description a listener can visualize. The songs wind up being more meditations on ideas rather than simple narratives or descriptive couplets.
"I would start writing about a person and then spread it out, make it broader," he says. One of the more striking songs on the album is "Black Black Ocean," in which Bachmann adopts a growling persona to sing about the wickedness and inevitability of human apathy, symbolized by a dark sea wave: "Evil lurks an evil pure/Rising up with an evil cure/To swallow every living thing/Evil evil entropy." It was written as a nihilistic character sketch, about a friend of Bachmann's, but in the process it becomes a scolding of all human sloth, "criticizing many for the faults of one," as Bachmann says.
Other songs, like "Under Sad Stars" ("One million stars can't heat such a cold cold world"), "Broken Man" ("Cause it's so hard to give a damn when you're a broken man") and "New Drink for the Old Drunk" ("It's no crime to resign misery with a bottle"), stake out similarly dark emotional territory, though the sparkling arrangements leave a listener with a sense of hope. The album winds down with peaceful, hypnotic sounds that wash over you like sleep?or a black, black ocean.
"The next one is going to be a little more up-tempo," Bachmann says, though he quickly adds that the next Crooked Fingers album might very well lean in the exact same direction: "It'll have some more dark humor, but hopefully not be so burdensome and heavy."
I'm tempted to think that the Crooked Fingers' song on the upcoming tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is a clue to his continuing interest in haunting, grim characters: next to contributions by Johnny Cash, Billy Bragg, Los Lobos and Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Bachmann will sing "Mansion on the Hill," Springsteen's sweet-sour vignette about poor folks' dreams of wealth, pleasure and escape. The Springsteen album is due on Sub Pop in early November, and the next Crooked Fingers album is due sometime next year.