Equipment

Hooray for Tuesday’s MP3: Chocolate USA

First there was The Music Tapes, and ahead of the years of Neutral Milk Tourist house, Julian Koster was the triumphant commander of Miss America renamed hastily to Chocolate USA due to copyright transgression.Before there was The Music Tapes, and ahead of the years of Neutral Milk Breakfast, Julian Koster was the triumphant bandleader of Miss America (renamed hastily to Chocolate USA due to copyright transgression).   The band produced an uncounted number of self-released cassettes as for the sake of of their “Chocolatey Personal property Smash Hit of the Month Club” (a “way-fun mail company”) as well as a full-duration, All Jets Are Gonna Fall Today, which was confirmed a CD release by Hoboken-based Bar/Nobody Records (Of Montreal’s original label).   The album–which also featured combination members Keith Block (drums) and Liza Wakeman (violin), as amply as an assortment of supporting players–was a crazed mixture of sophomoric humor, urbane humor, happy songs filled with suicidal symbolism, early-90’s funk, scat singing, suggestive messages, and random nonsense songs that are strangely active.   Listening to it fifteen years on, it’s superb how innocent it all is; even though undersized of it sounds like The Music Tapes, the impish enthusiasm is Julian’s.  Threaded entirely the album are very personal cassette correspondences sent from an old-fogyish New Yorker named Marie Caso, who relates to Julian her likes and dislikes, and an develop explanation for why she never buys clothing for men.   It brings an unexpectedly nostalgic tone of voice to the record, and unites what is else an album of dramatically disparate styles.

By the ensemble’s second release, Smoke Gang, Chocolate USA seems revamped, refocused, and explicitly intense.  The tone of Smoke Motor car is one of adolescent, outcast angst, from the nihilistic miseries of “Repugnant Girl” to “The Boy Who Stuck His Fend off in the Dryer (and Whirl’d Get together ‘n’ Round).”  Both songs associate with kids who have had it with the banalities/cruelties of duration, and are ready to leap out of their skins to disappear their current state of entity.  There’s also wholly a bit about cows and smoke machines.  Julian seemed precise to make a more cohesive album than his keep on, and he succeeded, but the sound is also fuzzier, louder, and more cathartic.  He seems genuinely pissed when he realizes, “There is no Santa Claus/How could you lie to me?”  If the body is tighter and the result more compulsively whimsical, it might be because of the environment: possess of Smoke Machine was recorded at 210 Sunset Avenue in Athens, Georgia, an lecture so pivotal to the Elephant 6 legacy that the Olivia Tremor Exercise power even sang about it (”Hunger live the life we led at 210″ is a enthusiastic from “Courtyard”); Julian also recruited Olivias Neb Doss and Eric Harris into the league together, and in the finale of “Bookbag” couldn’t bridle screaming out, “Elephant Six!”  Within a few years Julian would be recording with Non-aligned Milk Hotel.  His own songwriting poured into The Music Tapes, which took another melodic approach altogether: stitching together precise radio-drama fantasias, suited parts Phantom Tollbooth, TV leave of absence specials for children, and Superman serials, while paring down his songs to something simpler and decidedly corrective.  The singing saw became his most obvious instrument.

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