Until you become a parent, you simply can't imagine the compromises you make without a thought to accommodate the needs of your children. Quite apart from the poop factor (in which the pre-kid categories of “no poop” and “poop” are joined by new states of being like “just a little poop,” “no visible poop,” and “I don’t smell anything, let’s make dinner”), all parts of your life are subtly altered in ways you don’t even notice until something throws the changes into stark relief.
Take music, for example.
My kid turned one year old this week, which means it's been a pretty cool year. He’s already musical, capable of banging a drum in time for up to five beats in a row or strumming my guitar with his little fist if I make a chord for him. That's wonderful, but it also means that he cares what noise is on the stereo. Therefore, anything that isn't kid-approved has for now mostly passed from my life.
The Boy's favorite music is metal (Iron Maiden, Amon Amarth, Metallica), bossa nova, and bluegrass, which mean's I'm an incredibly lucky person with an incredibly hip youngster. But his favorite favorite music is one specific lullaby album that he needs to hear every night at bedtime, and often at naptime too. Given that bedtime can ramify without warning from a fixed moment in time into an exhausting four-hour campaign of sorties, clever feints, temporary détentes, and diplomatic appeals to reason (lost, by the way, on the infant mind) which only through Herculean effort grinds toward a denouement in which our little angel drifts away to dreamland, sometimes that damn CD gets played straight through five or six times.
The upshot is, no matter how much NPR and jaded indie-rock I can cram during the daylight hours, the last twelve months of my musical life have been owned by “Dancing with Bears” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Which is why the latest release from the New England-based Midriff label has been so welcome. The 2006 release by their flagship band, The Beatings, titled Holding On To Hand Grenades, was my favorite album of that year, and several other Midriff releases have come close to that very high standard. Since Midriff is essentially “the Beatings and their friends and collaborators,” the various projects, side projects, solo releases, and guest appearances add up to something like a white, postcollege Wu Tang Clan. Protect ya neck, New England!
The latest Midriff release is called The End of the New Country, and is attributed to a duo calling themselves Get Help. Get Help is a collaboration between Beatings guitarist and vocalist Tony Skalicky and New York musician Mike Ingenthron, who began writing songs together as a break from writing ad jingles. If Midriff has a GZA, it seems to be Skalicky, who has a very clear idea of what he wants his music to sound like and sticks to the plan like a pro.
What this means on vinyl (or in bits or scattered photons) is that like many other Midriff releases, Get Help drenches well-written songs and strong melodies in layers of fuzzy guitar and feedback which gradually build and ebb between enormous climaxes and quiet moments, a sound that is definitely, undeniably, refreshingly adult - not at all for little kids, and not at all like jingles.
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