February 15 - 22, 1 9 9 6

THE MERMEN: MAKING PURE MUSIC

The Mermen's A Glorious Lethal Euphoria, which came out twice last year (first in the spring on the ultra-small Toadophile label, then in September on the less-small Mesa), currently bears a sticker pegging the music as a cross between Dick Dale and Sonic Youth. Youth you all know, but Dale you may not; he's the player of that adrenaline-pumping guitar featured at the beginning of Pulp Fiction and a proponent of surf music. This longtime fringe genre is the aural equivalent of that pulsating rush one feels when riding and being ridden by the inexorable crest of capricious nature -- or so I imagine, being a lifelong landlocked Midwesterner with only skimpy and uncompelling memories of old Gidget movies for reference. But I do know that surf music, especially as embodied by Dale, is a combination of virtuosity and willfully retro sonics, which adds up to irony, which adds up to timeliness.

For the Mermen, a vocal-less trio (Jim Thomas, guitar and songwriter; Allen Whitman, bass; Martyn Jones, drums), surf music is a touchstone, a point of origin that they're continually in the process of leaving behind. Whereas surf is terse, this music is expansive -- three of the cuts exceed nine minutes, and the whole set runs 73. And Thomas's palette has as many colors on it as that of any ECM guitarslinger, moving way beyond the tight range of surf, though he's very sparing of the pastels -- a virtue in my judgment. He keeps his rough edges, as each song (slow, fast, or medium) is garlanded with those millennial signifiers -- the sound of tortured electrical particles -- we've all come to know and love (this must be the Sonic Youth part) while adhering to an essential melodic simplicity. Since this isn't jazz, dramatic arrangements serve the function of improvisation, like stretching out a simple idea to nine-minutes-plus through the use of tonal variety and subtle thematic embellishments.

And though this is the kind of stuff that gives them boners over at Guitar Player, you don't have to be a twang nerd to appreciate it. "I don't really understand what I'm doing," Thomas has said, which is encouragement for all of us as well as an indication that he's a man who puts more faith in inspiration than in the ability to parse chromatic wonders. Favoring sound and mood over finger-flexing is what makes the long ones like "And the Flowers They'll Bloom" work. It's all pacing and pure music (back to that in a second). Thomas isn't trying to knock you out, though he isn't above delivering a good pummeling ("Drub," "Lizard"). He's more into elaborating on simple plots, drawing you in through gradually intensifying repetitions with a theatrical sense of when to relight the backdrop. Or by establishing a languid just-hanging-out mood, as on "With No Definite Future and No Purpose Other Than To Prevail Somehow . . ."

About that pure-music thing. I haven't mentioned the programmatic aspects of this disc -- I've even avoided any direct mention of ocean, sea, or watery spray because (a) the record company sent a bunch of excerpts from reviews the disc received last year and almost all of them have really labored and unhelpful sea imagery, and (b) it doesn't matter. The Mermen have left their humble, wet origins behind. There's more of Frisell than Dale in this brew, but mostly it's Thomas's hairy-chested melodicism and his dedication to playing shallow music deeply. As deep as the . . . well, use your imagination.

-- Richard C. Walls

(The Mermen play T.T. the Bear's Place this Sunday, February 18. Their new EP, Songs of the Cows, on Mesa, hits the stores on February 20.)