New Roman Times
Today, I learned nothing, and that is a primary sign of what could be a bad day. I went to a meeting at work about my health insurance plan at the end of the day—two hours paid to do nothing but listen, really—and I bought a CD and read an article about Karl Rove in the Atlantic, but there was really nothing new there.
I don’t really feel like it was a bad day, but it wasn’t great, and I don’t feel enriched by it, and I’m not going to feel any different when I wake up tomorrow morning than I did this morning. I’m a little bit cleaner, because I finally took a shower, but that’s about it.
I wrote down a couple of things that I wanted to remember to write about, but I forgot the Postitnote that I wrote them down on at work, and I don’t remember one of them. Or, I wrote them early in the morning and while they seemed compelling subjects at the time, the one that I do remember is no longer interesting to me.
But here’s something that I can write about:
The first (actually truly new) Camper van Beethoven album in fifteen years came out on Tuesday. I bought it on Tuesday. Camper van Beethoven used to be my favorite band, and much of the music I listen to—still—is made by Camper alumni and issued by Magnetic Records, which is owned by the bass- and violin-players for Camper.
Most of Magnetic's output and graphic design and sound quality is high. The songwriting is good, which it should be, since most of these guys have been making music for something like twenty-five years now, and they were once in Camper van Beethoven, which was once the greatest band ever.
I was a little bit scared about the new Camper album right off the bat, before it came out, for several reasons:
First, David Lowery (the lead singer) left Camper to form the vile Cracker, and kicked the violinist out of Camper van Beethoven before their last “canonical” album, “Key Lime Pie”. Cracker’s music is mostly dreck—although there are a couple of good songs on their first album—so at this point I don’t really trust Lowery at all.
Even bands he’s just associated with, like FSK, a progressive polka band from Germany, and Sparklehorse (a band that I like) are marred by his participation. He seems now to have a singular talent for writing songs that at first seem infectious, and after several listenings become deeply annoying. An example is “Sick of Goodbyes”, from Sparklehorse’s “Good Morning Spider”. His songs become as cloying and sticky as smelling movie-theater popcorn is when you have to smell it for four hours.
Second, a review of two or three songs that were released to Pitchforkmedia.com—while positive—stated that the album was a sort of “concept album”, which it is. I will get back to this later.
Last, there is the title. It’s called “New Roman Times”, which, while an appropriate title about a newly Imperial country that is extremely divided ideologically, is a dorky pun even by Camper van Beethoven standards.
After reconciling various internal problems (which, as far as I can tell, stemmed from both David Lowery’s ego and his desire to break into the mainstream), Camper reformed two years ago and went on tour. I finally got to see them, having (as usual with music) arrived to the party a couple of years too late. They were amazing. You can only tell it every once in awhile from their old albums, but Camper van Beethoven is a rock band. They have an aggressive sound, but you can only hear this by seeing them live. On CD, they sound like a folk-rock band. I like both sounds.
What initially drew me to this band was its wistfulness and essential sweetness. Read this:
One of these days,
When you figure it, figure it all out,
Come and whisper in my ear.
Tell me it all,
Or tell me just a little bit,
You know it’s what I want to hear.
This lyric—while confrontational—is sung over a chord structure that is basically minor (three chords out of four), but balanced by a bouncing bassline that hops octaves and brings the whole thing back from the edge of sarcasm. This song is from Camper’s greatest album, “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart”. That album came out in 1989, but I didn’t find out about it until 1991, at which point the band had already broken up.
Or this, from the same album:
There might come a time
When things between us get
Just a little bit too weird;
We’ll move to different cities
For a temporary vacation,
But it’s just as you feared:
Never go back.
Never go back.
Never go back.
Camper van Beethoven is loved by its fans because its songs are often about ambiguity in relationships. Their very last song on their very first album is even called “Ambiguity Song”. It says this:
Everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
Everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
Someday soon,
It’ll all settle down,
But everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
And it goes on to say:
I’ve got some certain special feelings for you.
Don’t know if they’re good or bad,
But I just might give you a call,
But everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
They are also political. There is a song on “Key Lime Pie” that sounds on first listening like a beautiful love song, but when you listen to it closer is about Ronald Reagan.
New Roman Times is indeed a concept album, as Pitchforkmedia said it was. It’s about the War on Terror and its dehumanizing effect on its participants. Each song has a subheading—viewable only in the liner notes—that describes what is actually happening during the song. Thus, the opener, called simply “Prelude”, is more correctly titled “Prelude – A catastrophic attack occurs”. The song is actually a gentle instrumental.
The second song, which is really the opener of the album, is an attack. It has a distorted blend of guitars and violin playing an almost difficult to understand repeated riff that is in an odd time-signature, and it sends a clear message to the listener that the album that’s about to be heard is angry. This is not a surprise. The album, like our world, is in a state of emergency.
Following that is a song wherein (according to the sub-header of the song’s name in the liner notes) is about a young Texan volunteering for an elite military unit. By the end of the album, the young man is discouraged by his experiences [in Iraq], joins a Weathermen-type organization, and straps a bomb onto himself.
This is all good, and a perfectly good and cogent argument about the insanity of the War on Terror and what it does to people—making them crazy with Fundamentalism and Nationalism—but it could have been better.
There are a couple of purported love songs on “New Roman Times”, and sad songs, like one that is about the Texan soldier coming back to America minus a foot, but the album as a whole doesn’t quite live up to the anger you can hear in the first couple of songs.
“That Gum You Like is Back in Style” is an easy target: it’s written by David Lowery and his extremely unimaginative bass-player from Cracker. It’s a standard Cracker/Camper song with random-sounding lyrics, purported by the song’s sub-header to be about an intelligence operative receiving and trying to decrypt odd communiqués. But it sounds more like Lowery and Hickman had written the song already and then inserted it into “New Roman Times” because it wouldn’t fit onto a Cracker album and they weren’t willing to part with it.
The album—as a whole—is extremely postmodern not only in that it is so current that the photoshopping in the liner-notes looks rushed (or intentionally lazy?), but also that there are three songs on it that sound like the ethnic Ska songs that Camper were doing on their very first album, “Telephone Free Landslide Victory”. Again, these songs—while enjoyable to someone who is crazy about the band—have nothing to do with the narrative of the album. They don’t sound Arabic; they sound Russian, like Camper’s ethnic instrumentals always have.
It also, in a much subtler way, evokes a song from their third album, which is a play on the Charlie Daniels Band’s song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. In the Camper play on the Charlie Daniels song, the devil plays the violin so good that they invite him to join the band. In “New Roman Times”, the disillusioned Texas soldier joins “CVB”, an unspecified dissident acid-taking hippie-group.
There is one bit of lyric brilliance on “New Roman Times”. In a song spoken from the viewpoint of the Texas soldier early in the album called “Might Makes Right”, this happens:
They want us from their villages,
They want us from their towns.
Who can really blame ‘em,
Shit blows up when we’re around.
Sounds like exactly what’s wrong in Iraq to me.
Overall, though, none of the wistful sweetness of the old Camper van Beethoven is present on this album. It’s an angry and sarcastic album, but there are songs on it that are simply inappropriate because they feel like they’re not part of a cohesive whole. They feel like they’re tacked on as an appeal to people who are forty years old and can’t trust a Camper van Beethoven record unless it has a couple of Ska tracks on it or a fake country music song.
I’m listening to it right now for the fifth time. It’s not bad, but it comes nowhere near the epic scope of their last three albums. If they were going to make an album that was all about how mad they were about the fake War on Terror, they should have left out all the references to who they used to be as a band and just made the damned album.
I don’t really feel like it was a bad day, but it wasn’t great, and I don’t feel enriched by it, and I’m not going to feel any different when I wake up tomorrow morning than I did this morning. I’m a little bit cleaner, because I finally took a shower, but that’s about it.
I wrote down a couple of things that I wanted to remember to write about, but I forgot the Postitnote that I wrote them down on at work, and I don’t remember one of them. Or, I wrote them early in the morning and while they seemed compelling subjects at the time, the one that I do remember is no longer interesting to me.
But here’s something that I can write about:
The first (actually truly new) Camper van Beethoven album in fifteen years came out on Tuesday. I bought it on Tuesday. Camper van Beethoven used to be my favorite band, and much of the music I listen to—still—is made by Camper alumni and issued by Magnetic Records, which is owned by the bass- and violin-players for Camper.
Most of Magnetic's output and graphic design and sound quality is high. The songwriting is good, which it should be, since most of these guys have been making music for something like twenty-five years now, and they were once in Camper van Beethoven, which was once the greatest band ever.
I was a little bit scared about the new Camper album right off the bat, before it came out, for several reasons:
First, David Lowery (the lead singer) left Camper to form the vile Cracker, and kicked the violinist out of Camper van Beethoven before their last “canonical” album, “Key Lime Pie”. Cracker’s music is mostly dreck—although there are a couple of good songs on their first album—so at this point I don’t really trust Lowery at all.
Even bands he’s just associated with, like FSK, a progressive polka band from Germany, and Sparklehorse (a band that I like) are marred by his participation. He seems now to have a singular talent for writing songs that at first seem infectious, and after several listenings become deeply annoying. An example is “Sick of Goodbyes”, from Sparklehorse’s “Good Morning Spider”. His songs become as cloying and sticky as smelling movie-theater popcorn is when you have to smell it for four hours.
Second, a review of two or three songs that were released to Pitchforkmedia.com—while positive—stated that the album was a sort of “concept album”, which it is. I will get back to this later.
Last, there is the title. It’s called “New Roman Times”, which, while an appropriate title about a newly Imperial country that is extremely divided ideologically, is a dorky pun even by Camper van Beethoven standards.
After reconciling various internal problems (which, as far as I can tell, stemmed from both David Lowery’s ego and his desire to break into the mainstream), Camper reformed two years ago and went on tour. I finally got to see them, having (as usual with music) arrived to the party a couple of years too late. They were amazing. You can only tell it every once in awhile from their old albums, but Camper van Beethoven is a rock band. They have an aggressive sound, but you can only hear this by seeing them live. On CD, they sound like a folk-rock band. I like both sounds.
What initially drew me to this band was its wistfulness and essential sweetness. Read this:
One of these days,
When you figure it, figure it all out,
Come and whisper in my ear.
Tell me it all,
Or tell me just a little bit,
You know it’s what I want to hear.
This lyric—while confrontational—is sung over a chord structure that is basically minor (three chords out of four), but balanced by a bouncing bassline that hops octaves and brings the whole thing back from the edge of sarcasm. This song is from Camper’s greatest album, “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart”. That album came out in 1989, but I didn’t find out about it until 1991, at which point the band had already broken up.
Or this, from the same album:
There might come a time
When things between us get
Just a little bit too weird;
We’ll move to different cities
For a temporary vacation,
But it’s just as you feared:
Never go back.
Never go back.
Never go back.
Camper van Beethoven is loved by its fans because its songs are often about ambiguity in relationships. Their very last song on their very first album is even called “Ambiguity Song”. It says this:
Everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
Everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
Someday soon,
It’ll all settle down,
But everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
And it goes on to say:
I’ve got some certain special feelings for you.
Don’t know if they’re good or bad,
But I just might give you a call,
But everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
They are also political. There is a song on “Key Lime Pie” that sounds on first listening like a beautiful love song, but when you listen to it closer is about Ronald Reagan.
New Roman Times is indeed a concept album, as Pitchforkmedia said it was. It’s about the War on Terror and its dehumanizing effect on its participants. Each song has a subheading—viewable only in the liner notes—that describes what is actually happening during the song. Thus, the opener, called simply “Prelude”, is more correctly titled “Prelude – A catastrophic attack occurs”. The song is actually a gentle instrumental.
The second song, which is really the opener of the album, is an attack. It has a distorted blend of guitars and violin playing an almost difficult to understand repeated riff that is in an odd time-signature, and it sends a clear message to the listener that the album that’s about to be heard is angry. This is not a surprise. The album, like our world, is in a state of emergency.
Following that is a song wherein (according to the sub-header of the song’s name in the liner notes) is about a young Texan volunteering for an elite military unit. By the end of the album, the young man is discouraged by his experiences [in Iraq], joins a Weathermen-type organization, and straps a bomb onto himself.
This is all good, and a perfectly good and cogent argument about the insanity of the War on Terror and what it does to people—making them crazy with Fundamentalism and Nationalism—but it could have been better.
There are a couple of purported love songs on “New Roman Times”, and sad songs, like one that is about the Texan soldier coming back to America minus a foot, but the album as a whole doesn’t quite live up to the anger you can hear in the first couple of songs.
“That Gum You Like is Back in Style” is an easy target: it’s written by David Lowery and his extremely unimaginative bass-player from Cracker. It’s a standard Cracker/Camper song with random-sounding lyrics, purported by the song’s sub-header to be about an intelligence operative receiving and trying to decrypt odd communiqués. But it sounds more like Lowery and Hickman had written the song already and then inserted it into “New Roman Times” because it wouldn’t fit onto a Cracker album and they weren’t willing to part with it.
The album—as a whole—is extremely postmodern not only in that it is so current that the photoshopping in the liner-notes looks rushed (or intentionally lazy?), but also that there are three songs on it that sound like the ethnic Ska songs that Camper were doing on their very first album, “Telephone Free Landslide Victory”. Again, these songs—while enjoyable to someone who is crazy about the band—have nothing to do with the narrative of the album. They don’t sound Arabic; they sound Russian, like Camper’s ethnic instrumentals always have.
It also, in a much subtler way, evokes a song from their third album, which is a play on the Charlie Daniels Band’s song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. In the Camper play on the Charlie Daniels song, the devil plays the violin so good that they invite him to join the band. In “New Roman Times”, the disillusioned Texas soldier joins “CVB”, an unspecified dissident acid-taking hippie-group.
There is one bit of lyric brilliance on “New Roman Times”. In a song spoken from the viewpoint of the Texas soldier early in the album called “Might Makes Right”, this happens:
They want us from their villages,
They want us from their towns.
Who can really blame ‘em,
Shit blows up when we’re around.
Sounds like exactly what’s wrong in Iraq to me.
Overall, though, none of the wistful sweetness of the old Camper van Beethoven is present on this album. It’s an angry and sarcastic album, but there are songs on it that are simply inappropriate because they feel like they’re not part of a cohesive whole. They feel like they’re tacked on as an appeal to people who are forty years old and can’t trust a Camper van Beethoven record unless it has a couple of Ska tracks on it or a fake country music song.
I’m listening to it right now for the fifth time. It’s not bad, but it comes nowhere near the epic scope of their last three albums. If they were going to make an album that was all about how mad they were about the fake War on Terror, they should have left out all the references to who they used to be as a band and just made the damned album.
posted by interrobang at
10:40 PM
10 Comments:
Thank god you're back. Is "For Your Own Revolutionary Sweetheart" the place to start for someone who knows nothing about Camper van Beethoven but is intrigued by your post?
I'd recommend starting with "Key Lime Pie", as it's a bit more accessible. But "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart" is pretty good too. It helps if you can listen to it with headphones, and not a crappy car stereo with two speakers and no bass.
Samuel, unfortunately Interrobang got the name of his favorite album by his formerly favorite band incorrect. It is actually "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart." And yes, I agree it's a good place to start. If you like that and feel you're on to a great band I recommend you hunt down Camper Van Beethoven's out of print box set "Cigarettes and Carrot Juice" which has their first three albums, a rarities disc, and a live disc with songs mostly from their last two, "Our Beloved..." and "Key Lime Pie." You should find that for about $25 or so.
As for the New Roman Times review, I can respect that it didn't live up to your expectations but you've got a lot wrong in there. CVB fans blaming David Lowery for the bands demise is old hat, but claiming the band reformed out of Lowery's ego is left field, man.
Actually, the initial thawing came about when David Lowery asked Jonathan Segel (the amazing violinist he "sacked") to play on Cracker's cover of White Riot, which Camper used to play back in the day. Segel played, became something of a Cracker supporter, and soon he, Victor Krummenacher, and Greg Lisher were playing with Cracker doing some Cracker tunes and some Camper tunes. Rivalries were now aside. 2002 and the band started playing as Camper Van Beethoven again and this new album came out of their renewed vigor and rapport. A new album which I think is as good or better than anything they have done as a band or solo.
Now, I gotta agree with your admiration for Magnetic stuff. I think Victor's stuff is consistently brilliant and Jonathan Segel's Edgy Not Antsy is one of my all time favorite records. I also never could get much into Cracker, although their Countrysides record and the acoustic record with Leftover Salmon were really good I thought. And you can think Cracker are vile if you'd like, but attacking their "extremely unimaginative bass player" is out of line from someone with such a severe case of misinformation. First off, Cracker's bass player is Victor Krummenacher CVB's bass player. I assume you are referring to John Hickman. I've never met Hickman or seen Cracker, but reading posts from people who have suggests Hickman is always the first one out after a Cracker/Camper show to mingle with fans. Anyway.
Not liking "That Gum You Like"??? That's too bad. I wonder if you'd feel the same way if the song credits said Segel/Krummenacher rather than Lowery/Hickman the vile egomaniac and his unimaginative partner. Doing a check around the various CVB boards, and the reviews of NRT I've seen so far, praise for "That Gum You Like" seem to be particularly prominent. Ah well.
First of all, apologies for the mis-named record. I'm going to go back and change it, because I realized I'd done it at about nine o'clock this morning and have been embarassed about it all day.
I am referring to Hickman, and of course not Victor Krummenacher, who is like a god to me. I only ever owned the first Cracker album and "The Golden Age", the latter of which I thought was unspeakably boring. And when I looked at the first album again, years later, what was wrong with it was the bass. It's flat, and mostly just the root notes of the chords. Thank you for your thoughtful comment, though.
Well, if the bass on the first Cracker album doesn't spin yer wheel, then don't blame Hickman, who is Cracker's lead guitarist, not their bassist.
Well, I guess this additional error totally invalidates my opinion about the tone of this album. Please disregard this post.
Hi, I was the first anonymous. Like I tried to say, if the new album disappointed you that's fair. I could see why you might be pissed by people's reactions to your post. I think we, at least I, would have been cool with your review if you were commenting on the album rather than on the David Lowery vs. Jonathan Segel/Victor Krummenacher dynamic. All three guys point to the first breakup as being down to them all being young assholes in their twenties. They've all grown up. I'm sure it pisses off not just Lowery, but Krummenacher and Segel as well when people go back to the Lowery as egomaniac rant.
I'll give you an example. I got to see CVB when they first came back in 2002 in San Francisco. For an encore, they played Brides of Neptune, a then newish Cracker tune. I didn't know the song, but thought at the time it was a good tune. Next couple of days people on the CVB boards went crazy with "leave it to Lowery to end a CVB concert with a Cracker song" type of talk. Turns out a week or so later Victor Krummenacher posts (on the Magnetic board?) and tells everybody how lame that talk was, as that song as an encore was HIS idea.
Then last night at CVB's New York concert for CMJ, Cracker opened the show. Who was out adding violin for Cracker but Jonathan Segel.
So that's my beef with your review, the whole Lowery is an ass and the other guys are Gods viewpoint. I just think that's too easy and not fair to anyone in the band.
As for New Roman Times, I really like it! I hope you give it a few more listens and the tunes grow on you. Maybe catch you at a show somewhere, cheers.
Rob
Thanks for the kind words, Rob. I have been listening to the album NONSTOP all day. I do not think it is bad--I just think it has some unnecessary filler and without a couple of songs, it would have been better.
I know that sounds fucked up, since I have so much Camper material--including Jonathan Segel's "Storytelling" and the entire Monks of Doom output and Trotsky and Robi del Mar and both Dent albums, and even got into Granfaloon Bus--that it would seem like MORE Camper would always be a net plus, but songs like "I Hate This Part of Texas" are just lousy. I don't like "Hippy Chix" much, either.
I deeply love this band, but I wish they'd shown more editorial resolve this time.
That said, the album is being played over and over in my CD player right now. Right before it came out, I was in a sort of Flaming Lips fugue state, unable to listen to anything else at all. Most of the songs on New Roman Times are great. Some of them are just "eh".
I also wonder what happened to Edie Winograde. The liner notes do not say (as far as I can tell) who did the design, and the design looks lazy, especially the highly visible crop-marks around Jonathan Segel's neck in the picture beneath the CD.
This is the first album review I have ever done, and I probably didn't make it clear enough that I like the album. I probably emphasized too much my dislike of David Lowery. I should have said more about my love for Jonathan Segel and Victor Krummenacher and Chrispy Derson and Greg Lisher.
I was actually quite happy with the NRT booklet. First Camper disc with lyrics, I think.
Edie Winograde and also of course Bruce Licher have done great design work for CVB and the guys solo, but this one is by Victor Krummenacher. I think the Photoshop stuff is intentional, all done tongue-in-cheek.
Anyway, hope anyone who reads the blog will go out and get New Roman Times and let it sink in!
Rob
I hope they do, too.
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