Joan of Arc. Dick Cheney. Mark Twain. What do the three names have in common? Which of them is not like the other? Why should you care?
Now, which of the aforementioned questions are important to you? If you answered none, you wouldn't be wrong or right; but you'd be in my boat. Shall we paddle? Enough questions.
Many tracks on this album sounds more or less like So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness. That'd be lithe, unstructured acoustic guitar figures and lots of Kinsella free association. The first songy type of thing we come across is in the form of "Queasy Lynn." It's some great monster mash where Timmy actually sings with a melodic structure rather than floating dispassionately overtop it. A neat little tune, but it definitely doesn't stand up to their best stuff. I think Joan of Arc works best when they work with hook and repetition, rather than ambling around in a snarky Dadaist ether. The repeating vocal line of "You cannot want to not want," while smacking of trite Isaac Brock-ish contrarian poetry, manages to anchor "White and Wrong."
Joan of Arc make music that requires ridiculous patience and trust, and mine is waning. Something about the ebbs and flows of Live in Chicago, 1999 have just stuck with me, and I realize I'm in the minority here. People either dig the last two or the first two and Cap'n Jazz. So for the latter group I'll say steer clear and to the former I'll say give this one a chance. It's very similar to In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust. As for me, I give up. As rhythmically enticing as "A Half Dead Girl Named Echo" is, I ultimately just find it stale and unmoving. Kinsella's voice has officially expired for me. He can do different things with it, he just frequently chooses not to. That nasally disaffectation of his couldn't move the most open minded out there. It's not edgy. It's not studied incongruity. It's just stale.
Something like the stuttering, swelling sounds of "Gripped by the Lips" could be wonderful as an instrumental, but instead it gets some of Kinsella's patented brown icing. There's a two-part harmony that comes in that offers something better, but it's too short-lived to save the song. In fact, there's a ton of great music on this release, but Kinsella ultimately ruins the focus. I don't know about talking politics in experimental music, though. I suppose it could be done, but it should be secondary. Make the beast Cheney be an abstraction. What difference does it make? He could've called the album Julia Childs, Jim Varney, Paul Wolfowitz. The point is that this is experimental rock that has certain elements in place, but lacks a stirring unifying voice. And the hoarse whispering vocals on "Abigail, Cops and Animals" doesn't perk up the ears quite as much as the muted feminine giggles that unexpectedly pop up in the song. There's a pretty solid, weird album in here somewhere, but instead we're mired in the more tiresome side of uncompromising.
1. Questioning Benjamin Franklin's Ghost
2. Apocalypse Politics
3. The Title Track of This Album
4. Queasy Lynn
5. White and Wrong
6. Onomatopoeic Animal Faces
7. A Half-Dead Girl Named Echo
8. 80's Dance Parties Most of All
9. Deep Rush
10. Gripped by the Lips
11. Fleshy Jeffrey
12. Abigail, Cops, and Animals
13. Still from Miss Kate's Texture Dictionary
14. The Details of the Bomb
15. I Trust a Litter of Kittens Still Keeps the Coliseum
16. The Telephones Have Begun Making Calls
17. The Cash In and Price
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