Odds and ends

The Monks, Elastica, and more

by Douglas Wolk

The Monks' reputation, up to now, has rested on one album, Black Monk Time. Originally released in 1966, the disc features a band who come off like a herd of gorillas forced into Beatle suits. In fact, they were a bunch of American soldiers stationed in Germany at the height of the Cold War, and punk rock hadn't yet been invented as a way of channeling one's ferocious free-floating aggression. So they shaved their heads into tonsures, wore monks' robes, and wrote simple, mean little songs like "I Hate You" and "Shut Up." Their organ and banjo seem like holdovers from earlier, more personable times, but their attitude is pure venom and horniness.

The newly released Five Upstart Americans (Omplatten) is a set of early Monks demos, and only a few of its titles won't be familiar to people who've heard Black Monk Time already. But Upstart is tougher and more confused, messy in a way that wouldn't sound satisfying until years after it was recorded. (It also has a gimmicky snatch of church organ music at the beginning of each song.) This is the birth of the crude, the sound of a band groping for a tradition that didn't exist yet.

Elastica's first album was a wonderful distillation of the second wave of British punk's fun parts. It was also an aesthetic dead end: having had a hit ("Connection") with a direct rewrite of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" and packed the rest of the album with allusions to everyone from the Stranglers to New Order, they didn't have much of a voice of their own to develop. The new Elastica 6 Track EP import on Deceptive is audible wheel spinning -- which beats the last five years' worth of silence, anyway. There's a song by ex-member Donna Matthews that's a direct rewrite of Wire's "Kidney Bingos"; a home-recorded bit of instrumental fake Kraftwerk; a previously unreleased live track that's more than a little like Wire's "Being Sucked In Again"; two songs for which they brought in the Fall's Mark E. Smith to . . . well, not sing, exactly, but do that vocal thing he does, which has now transcended intelligibility; and a spiffy two-minute rocker called "Generator" that doesn't seem to have any particular stylistic ancestor. Here's hoping they take that last tack for the full-length record.

The NYC band Ida just came out of hiding to perform a few shows, at which they previewed new songs from the album they've been working on -- songs full of gorgeous three-part harmonies and vintage-country-song heartbreak. They've also self-released the children's album of the year, You Are My Flower. Actually, no artist or label is listed on the CD's cover, but it's the work of Ida singer-guitarists Elizabeth Mitchell and Daniel Littleton. Their interest in country and folk music from the first half of the century has led them to the tunes for kids that were part of the repertoire of the Carter Family, Leadbelly, and their kin. They sing and play familiar tunes ("Shoo-Fly") and less familiar ones ("Little Sack of Sugar") with the quiet sweetness and intimacy of people performing for an audience of one very small person. Bonus points for including a track listed as "Rock & Roll," a short recording of a very, very young-sounding group. Get it for somebody who'll thank you in 20 years.

Millie Jackson is the soul singer whom radio left behind, maybe because the impact of her recordings relied less on her actual performances than on what she was singing. Or rather, saying: she's famous for her mid-song spiels, and Topic A for her entire career is cheating.

Last year's reissue of her wife-versus-other-woman doubleheader Caught Up and Still Caught Up remains the essential Millie, but the new compilation Between the Sheets (House of Hits) is a pretty fascinating take on her work. It focuses on her ballad singing, and its centerpiece is "All the Way Lover," a 10-minute excoriation of lousy lays and lazy louses, male and female -- 20 years on, it's still shocking and funny. Jackson also knew that the biggest gold mine of cheating songs was contemporary country music, and she turns up the heat on Merle Haggard's "If You're Not Back in Love by Monday" and the standard "Loving Arms" until the ash floats to the ground like snow.

And finally: the metal world didn't quite catch on to Gorguts' Obscura (Olympic/Slipdisc/Mercury). One listener's comment on-line: "I've never heard a more disorganized pile of crap in my life. Death Metal has received a blow to the scrotum from this work." Fortunately, the album's reputation has started to spread to underground rock circles. Obscura has some of the weirdest guitar playing ever committed to a disc that isn't explicitly experimental: wheezing, scribbly, spasmodic yowls that rarely have much to do with the rest of the song. Otherwise, it's the usual double-bass-drum battery and bellowed lyrics like "I cross the threshold of the faceless ones," but they've got some mighty strange, and occasionally eye-opening, ideas about what rocks.