Don't Bury Me In Haiti
1993 Ardent Records, CD
Produced by NTJ and Jeff Powell
Engineered by Jeff Powell + Jeffrey Reed
Lyrics by Joe Lapsley, music by NTJ
All tracks recorded at Ardent Studios + Beale St. Studios, Memphis, Tn
All tracks mixed (Jeff Powell) and mastered (Larry Nix) at Ardent
Cover painting by Pinkney Herbert
Special thanks to: Duj, Lerm, Muke, Foon, Asian Bedfellow, War Whoop, Big Mr. Nude, Brotherhood Of The Tomb, Fark, Libby, Albert Alexander and all our friends at Ardent
All tracks published by Photon Music
Performers:
Joe Lapsley: vocals, guitar, banjo, harmonica, sound effects
Tee Cloar: guitar, banjo, recorder, percussion, background vocals
Steven Conn: bass, harmonica, percussion, background vocals
Paul Buchignani: drums, Moog, percussion, background vocals
Greg Easterly: texture, violin, zither, background vocals
John Whittemore: guitar, vocals, piano, Mellotron, percussion
Guests:
Bart - Saxophone
Rick Steff - Hammond B3
Track Listing:
- Little Toymaker (instrumental)
- Passive
- The Brucification Before Pilate
- Nothing So Heinous
- German Song
- Solitary Guy
- Mental Obsession/Physical Craving
- Wei Jia (instrumental)
- Gung Gung Chi Che Piao
- My Baby Loves Me
- Waiting In Sverdlovsk
- Too Many Cows
- He's Not The Same
- Unnecessary Surgery
- Barbara of Seville
Reviews:
Memphis Flyer, Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 1993:
As much as I hate the idea that rock lyrics are merely poetry set to music, I like some of Neighborhood Texture Jam's poetry set to music. You can't really call Joe Lapsley a singer; he relays his jaundiced boho commentaries in a voice that sounds like a baritone Lou Reed. But the rambles that shape NTJ's second album (the first release on the reactivated Ardent label) are way better than the recent mutterings of Reed. The way Lapsley twists words and twirls syllables on "Passive" and "Solitary Guy" makes it clear he's not just a poet fronting a rock band; his phrasing and timing are perfect. That most of these songs would work without Lapsley's rants is a testament to the eclectic, inventive passion that's woven through the 15 cuts.
Pop Culture Press #28:
Memphians young and middle-aged alike have been treated for some time to the performance antics of this former talent-show act reunited into serious business. Featuring two native Memphians (and four transplants from Jersey, Vermont, Nashville, and Mobile), the six-piece outfit has melded blazing guitar and textural melee with worldly vocal diatribes to manifest a thinking man's hostility toward the bullshit around us. Sometimes funny, more often disturbing, Texture has consistently demanded that we observe what we'd least like to acknowledge.
Texture's 1989 debut disc, Funeral Mountain (soon to be re- released on Feralette Records), succeeded in capturing the raw earnest of the band's first year of performance. With Don't Bury Me in Haiti, Texture has made the transition from performance band to recording artists. With 15 tracks widely woven with threads of every gauge and color, the new album careens through frenzied cacophanies, lonely observations, abject silliness and swirling rants as though it were a randomized roller coaster daring the most staunch among us to take a ride and see how long we'll hold on.
Most prominently improved is the widely expanded use of texture by Greg Easterly and co. What was virtually a stage gimmick upon their reunification in 1988 has become the major component of a dense new psychedlia. The texture has widened out from the mere trash can, street sign, and broken bottles to weedeaters, paper cutters, coffee cups, and violins (on which Easterly has a particularly dangerous perspective). With the instrumental composition so much more varied, the texture becomes more critical to the overall feel of the music.
None of this could succeed if not for the elaborate production by the band and Jeff Powell. Haiti required a careful hand that could remain steady through assults of shrieking guide noodle, agonizing violin wail and frighteningly sociopathic vocals.
Though the first half seems largely to draw on Texture's traditional composition, they crash haphazardly through the guardrail and into the abyss. "Solitary Guy" is fabulously retro, using the most cutting-edge studio technology to sound as if it were recorded in 1928. A little banjo ditty that sounds almost ridiculous, it evokes the same wry smile that much of the simpler music from that era does while maintaining a familiar blues integrity. The roller coaster takes a long plummet into "Mental Obsession/Physical Craving," seven agonizing minutes of a new standard for musical derangement as Lapsley shamelessly reflects on the brutality of alcoholism. The band mixes time signature into a hideous morass; this track would do even a latter-day King Crimson proud.
One of their oldest and most shocking live numbers, "My Baby Loves Me" is a scathing dirge that puts Mountain's "Torsos of Murdered People" and Texture's oft-performed "Wino Herd" to rest.
Essential to understanding the breadth of the band's range is "Waiting In Sverdlovsk," the somber document of a lonely vodka-line patron in the heart of the USSR. Released as a b-side of the "McThorazine" 45rpm last year, "Sverdlovsk" sounds even more clear and detailed here in digital.
Somewhere between the Butthole Surfers and "Sister Ray," "Unnecessary Surgery" eschews lyrics for electronic megaphoned imperatives within the ever-increasing din of the band at full crank, creating a horrendous wash of guitar wail and sirening violin.
Haiti is very often difficult music, and many might find the blitzkreig tracks such as "Mental Obsession" and "Unnecessary Surgery" nearly unbearable. But what Texture has been about from the beginning has been exposing what many would rather ignore, forcing the spectator to Look! Listen! This is what we've created for ourselves!
Kansas City Star:
Noise. You have to have a basic appreciation of noise to get into this album. It helps if you too enjoy making noise. Not everyone does. Many people find noise bothersome, strident in its disorganization. But these six guys who are Neighborhood Texture Jam love noise. In fact, one of the band members is listed as provider of "texture" without any further explanation. Exactly what that job entails is difficult to guess until you are assailed by Don't Bury Me in Haiti.
The album is rich in texture. Texture that changes from one song to the next; from the primitive and delightfully disturbing "Little Toymaker" to the very straightforward, slickly produced "Passive" back to the primitive on "Solitary Guy" and to the over the edge noise of "Mental Obsession/Physical Craving" and back and forth for the duration of the CD.
It would be unfair to pigeonhole NTJ as industrial, though the eleven minute "Unnecessary Surgery," much like "Mental Obsession," certainly can't be characterized any other way. The majority of the songs are a hybrid, mostly alternative pop, with with undeniable industrial ancestry. Even without the industrial undercurrent, it is a peculiar brand of pop that NTJ offer. "German Song" is sung, unsurprisingly in German (nonsensical German, but German all the same). "Gung Gung Chi Che Piao" is all in a Chinese dialect (Mandarin? Cantonese? Psuedo-Chinese noodling?) "Solitary Guy" sounds as if it were transferred from a dusty 78, complete with pops and scratches. "He's Not the Same" has a Prince-like groove combined with lyrics proclaiming, He's not the same/since the operation/He's not the same/without his medication.
This is music-making on the fringe, music that teeters on the edge of entropy. Absurdity abounds and helps make Don't Bury Me in Haiti such a terrific find.
Clarion Ledger:
Neighborhood Texture Jam - Paul Buchignani, Tee Cloar, Steven Conn, Greg Easterly, Joe Lapsley, and John Whittemore - has evolved from a vigorous college band into one of the mainstays of contemporary Memphis music. NTJ makes good use of it's roots, which seem to be sunk deep into the riparian loess of the Bluff City. "Don't Bury Me In Haiti", the band's latest release on the Ardent label, throbs with a bubbling soulful funk.
Part of the persona of NTJ is its unusual choice of instrumen- tation, which suggests that the band feels secure enough in its abilities to seek out unusual acoustic gear. Bird calls, coffee mugs and goosecalls are listed as instruments.
Don't Bury Me In Haiti has plenty of massive guitar constructs. The vocals are handled well by Lapsley. Through the solid work of bassist Conn and percussionist Buchignani, the rhythm section is slithery and sophisticated. Conn's bass riffs are answered by Buchignani in a sort of call-and-response dialogue that lifts the structure of the songs into a swirling rock 'n roll torrent.
NTJ's focus appears to fall somewhere between alternative and power pop. Don't Bury Me In Haiti is full of whimsy and humor, making it very listenable, and the band takes the opportunity to send up some of the cliches that haunt rock 'n roll wannabes. All in all, Don't Bury Me In Haiti is a worthy project. If the CD is an example of the product that the new Ardent label is interested in putting out, it is a good start and an indication that we should look forward to its future releases, which will include work by Little Rock bands Two Minutes Hate and Techno Squid Eats Parliament.
Harbinger:
DOWN THE PROMO PIPELINE: Eek, here's one from the not-well boys from Memphis, and it seems that they want to take us on some experimental journey. What I mean is in this slew of songs (fifteen), they run the whole range from "Little Toymaker," at barely over a minute, to the maniacally obsessive "Unnecessary Surgery," with its call over a loudspeaker for the surgeon to return to his table, a hefty near-eleven minute "jam." You can almost smell the sanitizing chemicals. There's "German Song" which shakes things up with some schlock humor, but on a more preachy note "Too Many Cows" tends to tell us what they don't eat much. In "Solitary Guy," it sounds as though they were going for a mock Delta Blues sound with the no-frills guitar and vocals only. The most sharpened point on this disc may be in the second song, "Passive," in which they ask the screaming question, "What will you do when they cut off your cable?" The answer to that question may seem frightening to some, but see for yourself. There's only one way to find out, go check out the Neighborhood Texture Jam the next time they play at the Vincent Van Go Go. And be sure to wear your surgical scrubs.