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The Dark Get Going
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Quasi: When the Going Gets Dark
Touch & Go, 2006
Rating: 3.4
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Posted:
March 27,
2006
By
Peter Landwehr
Janet Weiss is an excellent drummer. She is also notable for being in
both indie-pop duo Quasi (with ex-husband and former Heatmiser Sam
Coomes) and rock heroines Sleater-Kinney. This kind of intersection is
sometimes meaningless, but it's significant given the direction that
Quasi takes on its new album.
While hardly opting for the retro distortion that marked
last year's
standout Sleater-Kinney album, The Woods, Quasi shoots for a kind of
raw, jamming purity on When the Going Gets Dark, turning to Dave
Fridmann (producer of both The Woods and just about everything in
The Flaming Lips' catalog) to add the finishing touches. The result is
as pure a jazz-rock blend as Coomes and Weiss could desire, one that
superbly highlights their chemistry; each track stomps heavily and
smoothly, with Weiss' drums filling any and all gaps as Coomes wends his
way around the studio on guitar, piano, and bass: the Fiery
Furnaces/Jerry Lee Lewis piano insanity and ebullient singing of "The
Rhino," the guitar solo at the core of "I Don't Know You Anymore" and
the long, building jam of "Death Culture Blues" are all high points.
The difficulty of When the Going is that, on any album that
strives for this kind of consistent flow, the artist treads the thin
line between consistent emotional peak and being stuck in a musical rut.
Quasi doesn't fall into the crevasse, but there are definite moments of
scrabbling on its edge -- "Presto Change-O" ultimately becomes aimless,
while "Beyond the Sky" slowly builds up synth noises for three minutes
without providing any kind of payoff. Similarly, the album is marred
with a few moments of marked lyrical impenetrability ("I'm Popeye the
sailor man / I live in a garbage can" is the low point), but clever
political jabs like "There's somebody watching you everywhere/Except in
your dreams, they can't see you there" (in the vein of the more serious
political onslaught of Quasi's last album, Hot Shit) provide a
nice counterweight.
In the end, Coomes and Weiss put together a self-satisfied album that
works best as a showcase for their collaborative prowess. It's not
earthshaking, but it manages a small cocktail of politics, jazz, and
well-produced indie-rock that you can refer to as "jams" without feeling
embarrassed. One won't keep the volume at 10 all the time, but there are
moments that call for it.
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