Swirling life

Spring Heel Jack make the new rock

by Charles Taylor

It's usually been the case that any form of music singled out as having no place in rock and roll (as disco, punk, and rap all were) turns out to be a signpost for where the music is going. I understand that some people just don't connect with electronic dance music: house and ambient and techno and jungle and trip-hop. But what I hear in the less-thoughtful responses from many rock fans, in their dismissal or outright contempt, is an echo of the mid-'70s cry "Disco sucks!" In other words, the old rock shibboleth that there are some people (blacks and gays, in the case of the anti-disco crowd) who have no place in rock culture.

A few weeks ago MTV ran a "Where Are They Now?" special on '80s metal stars, and there was Lita Ford saying that there are plenty of people who don't like rap, who don't like alternative music, who want to know why there isn't any rock and roll on the radio anymore. It's easy to dismiss that argument as a has-been's sour grapes, but it also speaks for a large number of people for whom the phrase rock and roll refers to a very narrow range of guitar-driven music. If the likes of Entroducing . . . D.J. Shadow, Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album, C. J. Bolland's killer single "Sugar Is Sweeter," and Spring Heel Jack's new 68 Million Shades (Island) don't deserve to be thought of as rock and roll, then the term has outlived its usefulness.

The biggest stumbling block about the new electronic music is the oft-heard complaint that it's faceless. That is to say, it puts the fan and the critic into the unfamiliar position of responding to music from which the obvious, dependable manifestations of narrative and persona are absent.

I can't pretend I feel as close to this music as I do to music that's built around a performer's immediately discernible voice. And it may be that the albums that adapt this music for its own purposes, like Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded and U2's stunning new Pop (which may turn off almost as many people as it attracts), will be the way it's accepted into the mainstream. But it seems odd to say that there's not a discernible personality to techno or ambient when even a cursory listen to albums by the likes of Tricky, the Chemical Brothers, and Underworld reveals different sensibilities. This is music designed to connect immediately with an audience, the people on the dance floor, so it can't be said to be removed from human interaction. And if you accept the modernist notion that an audience completes a work of art by uncovering its meanings, isn't it possible that the faces and the body of this music come from the people dancing to it?

What all this demands of fans and critics is a more imaginative response. Although it shouldn't require too much work to hear the inclusiveness and expansiveness in Spring Heel Jack's 68 Million Shades. I don't think there's a track on the album that doesn't radiate good feeling. 68 Million Shades gives you the sensation of embarking on a journey. Spring Heel Jack (who worked on Walking Wounded) have married the romanticism of dance music to the romanticism of heading for new frontiers and feeling boundaries expand in front of you. If this were a movie, it would be one shot in wide, airborne vistas that give you the sensation of traveling over vast tracts of land. (That one of the tracks is called "Pan" only reinforces the impression.) "Midwest" is the sound of Ennio Morricone on ecstasy. The lone guitar line (like the electronic blips in the opening "Take 1") seems to be echoing across so wide an expanse that every contour in the soundscape becomes palpable. The sounds taking flight at the top of the mix might as well be birds gliding overhead.

Spring Heel Jack know how to use the rapid insistence of the beats as a stable base for the synthesized textures of their music. Every new riff, every variation in the beat, every sample and instrument added to the mix registers with the clarity of spring water. And yet the insistence of the beats is what anchors 68 Million Shades to the urban life that's the traditional setting for dance music. As you become accustomed to the relentlessness of the pace, you feel as if you were being given the ability to process more and more. It's like the clarity of the seemingly expanded moments before a car crash minus any of the dread. Listening to 68 Million Shades is like standing on a crowded corner on a clear, sunny day waiting for a "Walk" sign and being able to take in every detail of the city swirling around you.

Spring Heel Jack play Axis this Saturday, March 22. Call 262-2437.