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Well, if she is happy, she's not hollering about it. New Problems is an exquisite album, musically and lyrically, but one more likely to be played in solitary darkened rooms, not on dance floors. Sometimes Theolonious Monk seemed to compose, play, and deconstruct a tune all at the same time. He could imply a melody without actually playing it; he could employ silence as effectively as sound; he could craft a composition with minimal and minimalist resources. He was a master of shifting meters and accents. Karla Schickele shares some of these gifts. Maybe this is best heard when she builds songs on simple two-note figures. "*" opens the CD with two chime-like notes accompanied by percussion; it makes me think of the opening of that song by The Supremes, "Love Child," somehow stripped down. On the next track, "Not Home," Schickele develops those two notes into a repetitive but startling I chord--major III chord progression over which float violin and clarinet. Should we call the style psychedelic chamber punk? Should we turn Andy Warhol's phrase Pop Art on its head and called "New Problems" Art Pop--art songs treated as popular songs? Schickele's recasting of the Mamas and the Poppas' "Got a Feelin'" shows how her sense of harmony and arrangement can be brilliantly applied to other people's songs. This has harmonies as beautiful as anything the Mamas and the Poppas did. All the movement of this recording comes from the vocal; the quirky accompaniment provided by an odd array of instruments sounds static. The beat entrances like a hypnotist's watch. The song shimmers in the distance. Since Schickele played bass in the band "Ida," it's not surprising that many of the other songs on New Problems are driven by bass or guitar licks. "Knoxville," New Problem's rocker, mates a pretty standard guitar progression with the idiosyncratic drumming. "Always So Good" features dual bass lines and no other instrument at all. Old geezer than I am, some of New Problems reminds me of mid-period Beatles, most particularly of Magical Mystery Tour's instrumental "Flying." "Play by the Book" seems to have that enveloping sound that comes from playing a tape backwards, and those damned seagulls from "Tomorrow Never Knows" return in "Telegram." Schickele also uses dissonance and just plain noise. The liner notes credit Dan Littleton with "sounds" on "Play By the Book," and Rose Thornton with "thumb piano" and "sonic blindfold baritone guitar" on "Got a Feelin'" The music will please, intrigue, and perhaps irritate you at first. But Schickele is a fine lyricist, employing the same economy that pervades her arrangements. "Telegram," a Sylvia Plath poem set to music by Schickele, is the ninth song on the CD. Unless you are familiar with the poem, there's nothing that would make you think it was not another one of Schickele's lyrics. Look at "Always So Good."
Like a dream, New Problems straddles the line between the recognizable and the mysterious, the familiar and the foreign. If it's not "brooding," it is, at least, meditative. Plan on listening with both ears. And I'm sure Karla Schickele is happier than she sounds.
*New Problems can be ordered directly from Tiger Style
Records at www.tigerstylerecords.com |
Karla Schickele is
probably happier than she sounds. It's reported in SLAMM MAGAZINE
that she said of New Problems, "It's not a slow,
brooding album. There's also a bunch of rock songs."
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