With the often vapid, territorial pissing of trends and provincial music(s), music can be tiresome and predictable. Most music that becomes popular nowadays can be traced back to an earlier trend that happened decades ago. It'd be arrogant to claim, however, that the more avant-garde sectors of music are any more original or 'authentic' than, say, the garage rock or disco-punk trends; all music has its influences, and all of it's hybrid. However, the difference between those in the vanguard and the more conservative musicians can be found in audience reception.
The Crainium's one and only album, A New Music for a New Kitchen, for example, is still very much part of a negotiation (as opposed to appropriation) of sound, despite it being clearly influenced by the short-lived No Wave scene of the '70s/early '80s. There's no co-optation involved here. Dragging the sounds of D.N.A., Mars, and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks through noise and post-punk movements of the late 20th century, The Crainium play with sounds that still resist convention and conformity. This is why their music in 1998 has continued resonance today; the codes in this music are still very much dynamic and alive, no matter how old the influences are.
In this hour-long document of nervous spasms and intricate song writing, The Crainium balance tight composition with blasts of free chaos. With discordant guitars, contorted drumming, and penetrating vocals, The Crainium channel the improvisational aspects of free jazz while signaling an era entrenched in noise contextualized; it's Cecil Taylor meets Boredoms meets James Chance meets Melt-Banana. It's intelligent music that harnesses the exciting destructive elements of punk, simultaneously acknowledging its home at the outer edges of societal normalcy. And it's this resistance to societal normalcy that's expressed in its lyrics, which deconstruct the notion of gender in a society that employs the construction for power politics (hence, the album title).
A New Music for a New Kitchen will probably never achieve the level of acclaim that most records of this caliber do -- not because it can't be appreciated or because it's ahead of its time, but because it's an anomaly. It's not part of a scene or a movement, and the embrace of dissonance and exclusion of tonality has assured its obscurity among the more straightened crowd. If anything, The Crainium makes it apparent that the No Wave scene fizzled out much too early, and the critique of gender in music is at best a slight hum. Even though Tim Dewitt and Brian DeGraw are now in Gang Gang Dance, their work in the Crainium remains their most penetrating output. A New Music for a New Kitchen isn't a cry for help; it's a scream to rise above the mediocrity of rosy-cheeked America. It's just too bad that the Crainium isn't around to keep things moving.
1. The roles we play, a dead-ended game. We have to change. Create and rearrange. The roles we play they are a dead-ended game.
2. Watch who they beat, watch who they eat.
3. You pretend that you depend, but now you are, are you, visible?
4. There are no rabbits in my hat (yes, yes, yes, I am a traitor to my sex!)
5. Abracadabra! What am I now?
6. Only true love will break the rules.
7. Your penis, it is tiny, and it can not spell.
8. Untitled
9. Cut it out of my body, cut it out of my mind, to look, no look
10. Untitled
11. What are we hiding? (Parts 1-2 and 3) - Blood and babies, over tea. The eggtree and the ebbing tides. The main in the moon, drinks claret
12. New hormones. Until then, we will not know what love is
13. Untitled
14. A new music for a new kitchen. Or, (How I raised myself up from the dead, and you can tell too!)
15. The coquettery of immobility oh watch how I bake, a vicitm, a baby, a coital cake
16. Untitled
17. A new music for a new kitchen
More about: Gang Gang Dance, The Crainium
