First Look: New Quasi Album

On American Gong, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, abetted by Joanna Bolme, channel their inner Who. The payoff, though, is all pop - with power.

By Jennifer Kelly

Quasi isn't exactly settling gracefully into an elder statesman slot. The band - a partnership between Sam Coomes and Sleater-Kinney/Jicks drummer Janet Weiss - has been going, intermittently, for 17 years now, with eight studio albums and a clutch of singles to show for it. Conflict was always part of the band's DNA, on a personal level, one guesses, since the two principles are divorced former partners, but also on a musical one. There's a deep divide between Quasi's witheringly caustic lyrics and its buoyant sing-along melodies, between its Beatles-pop rocksichord hooks and the surging maelstrom of its guitar freak-outs, and this chasm has only grown deeper of late.

The addition of Joanna Bolme (also from the Jicks) at bass has enabled a volume-blistered, thunderous rock sound, underlining the M80-in-the-parking-lot explosiveness of Weiss' drumming and bringing out Coomes' inner guitar hero. It's no accident that new album American Gong (Kill Rock Stars) ends with a cover of the Who's "Heaven and Hell". There's a Live at Leeds-level rock intensity to much of this album, married, as the Who's songs often were, to transcendent, melodic hooks.  Consider "Repulsion," which kicks off in a squeak of feedback, and half obliterates its melodies under distorted thicknesses of guitar distortion. Its lyrical imagery is harsh with whores and piss and angry bed-wars. Yet when the clangor breaks for the chorus, the single word title dragged out over a series of shifting, tightly harmonized intervals, the payoff is all pop.  

American Gong is an unusually guitar-centric Quasi album. Coomes' keyboards take a leading role in only a couple of these songs, in the Beatles psychedelic "Everything and Nothing at All" and the burned and busted piano ballad "Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez." There's some acoustic strumming in bittersweet "The Jig Is Up" and a blues-rocking vamp in "Black Dog and Bubbles," but for the most part, the six-string is electrified, fuzzed and turned way, way up.

Guitar rock tends naturally towards triumph, and perhaps this is why American Gong is downbeat, but not actually depressing. Mortality, setbacks, hard times all take a turn in Coomes' lyrical scenarios, yet none are allowed the final word. Watch how "Bye Bye Blackbird" (following the nursery rhyme melody of "Baa Baa Blacksheep") gets the financial crisis down in two lines: "Bye bye blackbird/days are getting cold/snakes and lizards are sucking up the gold/chrome-plated plastic they give you in return/teach you a lesson you shouldn't have to learn." Or how "Laissez les Bon Temp Roulez" observes that one person's life is "just a piss in the ocean, a grain of sand." And yet there's a sense of persistence and modest overcoming in these songs.  "Your sadness and sickness are nothing to prize," sings Coomes in "What Now", "Leave them behind and rise." After the extremely downbeat, borderline whiny "Laissez," the band slips in a bit of self-mockery in "Howler," a 41-second recording of a dog howling, possibly at the moon.  

The best songs on American Gong are clustered toward the front. Nothing in the latter half matches "Repulsion," "Little White Horse," or "Bye Bye Blackbird." "Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez," in particular, lasts far too long and showcases far too well the shortcomings of Coomes reedy, strangled voice. Still, hang on for the Who cover, with its gleeful guitar vortex and chaos-flirting, beat-rupturing fills on drums. If the Who could turn their views on the afterlife into one of the world's great rock songs, then you can't blame Quasi for dipping pop into darkness as well.