Jam of our times: "Abacab"

A big tune off a big album that certainly deserves a full track by track appreciation, but it's the title cut to 1981's Abacab that'll get the spotlight this time around.¹ Although the Gabriel freaks may have bemoaned Abacab's continued appropriation of the era's new wave and pop aesthetics, here we've got a song that finds Banks, Collins and Rutherford delivering a dose of paranoia wrapped in synthesized threads that provides an eerily prescient soundtrack to our 21st century fueled by fear and cyber-panic.

The title was originally based on the song's work in progress structure, but in its final form the meaningless grouping of letters "A-b-a-c-a-b" comes to stand for intangible menace, an unknown terror lurking just beyond the edge of perception, a smothering unease that jolts the sleeper into a state of asphyxiated alert (but there's a hole in there somewhere). In "Abacab" we're trapped in a tormented mind as this secret agenda plays out, a helpless observer. 

And the music squarely sets "Abacab" in a tech-infused Tronscape, crackling to life with an incessant electronic bass pulse - robotic, unfeeling, and merciless. It's the unrelenting mechanical churn that'll drive this tune forward, as an icy dagger of lead guitar slices through the intro and enters into a call and response with ghostly bursts of synthesizer. The falsetto vocals on the chorus seem to taunt us with their intoning of the title, Phil cries out in protest but there's no reply at all. It all reaches its apex amidst the tangled circuitry of the bridge, human and electronic voices merging into one amidst flurries of strobe like sythesizer. Back for the final verse an irritating electric chirp keeps time with the hi-hat, the digital world now closing in, impossible to escape.

A woozy, wrung out from the stress synth line leads into the track's extended outro jam, the drums down shifting as we enter the final stages of assimilation. Tony's writes code via sparse, fuzzy blurps, Mike answers back with howls at the moon, the two in consort navigating the nerve net of this new flesh for the final three minutes as some unfathomable creature screeches in the distance.

^{1. [yeah, talking about the full 7min LP version, not the criminally edited single release.]↩}

Gotta help me juke it, baby

Exemplified on those pillars of heaviosity from the ground zero year of 1970, In Rock and Very 'eavy, Very 'umble, organ driven hard rock litters the eras releases big and small. One tune I keep coming back to is Boomerang's "Juke it" from their self titled 1971 LP. Boomerang's organist Mark Stein helped start it all as a member of Vanilla Fudge in the sixties, and formed Boomerang following the Fudge's break up.

 

"Juke It" announces its arrival with a lead lined boot kicking down your front door, and we're thrust headlong into a juggernaut of a guitar/Hammond riff, one that struggles to negotiate each beat as the weight of every note seems to drag down its forward movement. Jo Casmir intones the sorry state of his sorry existence, one on the verge of collapse lest his woman lend a hand and help him "juke it," the tune building up and spilling over via a tumbling phrase that sounds like the guitar and Hammond are engaged in an electric whip battle.

"Juke It's" extended bridge finds guitarist Richard Ramirez¹ in full stranglehold mode on the neck, first via a descending lick that pierces the meaty underbelly of the rhythm section, then a meandering solo that steps on the wah-wah for some expressive note wringing, howls of nickel plated pain summoned forth. "I know you'd feel so warm inside" bellows Casmir, now in the full throes of carnal frustration, Boomerang propelling the song back home to it's finale, one that finds that lashing lick dismantled, reassembled and repeated in a psychopathic attack on the listener. Oh, the humanity!

Though tracks like "The Peddler" and "Cynthia Fever" come close, the remainder of Boomerang fails to reclaim the might of "Juke It," slipping in too many soul ballads and some flaccid funk that strangely predicts Deep Purple's own stumbles on Stormbringer, even employing a dual lead vocals that are a dead ringer for Coverdale/Hughes.

1 yes you read that correctly, but I'm assuming this is an unfortunate coincidence and not a young Night Stalker on guitar?

A hot and windy August afternoon with "The Analog Kid"

One of the highlights of Rush's 2012 Clockwork Angels tour (set to resume this Spring) was the return of "The Analog Kid" to the band's set, lifted from 1982's Signals. After orbiting around the futuristic/fantasy worlds and side-long excursions of albums like 2112 and Hemispheres, by the eighties the starship Rush had landed back on earth and would release throughout the decade what is for me their best, most enduring material. "The Analog Kid" stands tall on an album I personally rate at the top of the band's extensive discography. As on many tracks from this era, lyricist/drummer Neil Peart explores real world ideas that would resonate with the band's core fan base of middletown dreamers, while the trio's instrumental work was at it's most dexterous and dynamic, with new colors and shades being explored via an increased use of synthesizers.

"The Analog Kid" explodes out of the gate with a rolling major key guitar and bass riff that establishes a hurried sense of momentum - and if you're like me, you're instantly transported back to pedaling the wheels of your Huffy BMX through the streets of Signals' mid-eighties suburban landscape. "The Analog Kid" stirs up memories of the energy of youth, the particular type of freedom it offers, and the unknowable future that lies beyond. Come chorus time a luminous vista born of synthesized voices emerges, the wide-eyed Kid reflecting on his natural surroundings while longing for the lights of the city. The track's extended finale takes on a more urgent tone, reflected in it's ringing minor chords and uncertainty in the lyrics - "when I leave I don't know what I'm hoping to find, and when I leave I don't know what I'm leaving behind." An abrupt break leaves only the sound of a rapid sequencer humming in the foreground - Signals' electronic heartbeat at work - before Alex Lifeson's guitar solo swoops in on a whammy dive and unleashes a whirlwind of thorny, squealing shreddage.