Fingerpickin' good

Mellow Pullman and Six Finger Satellite

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

Somewhere in the middle of his immortal Double Live Gonzo, that great sage Ted Nugent uttered a manifesto for a generation. Addressing an audience in Nashville in the '70s, Nugent posed the question, "Did anyone come here to be mellow tonight? If you all came to be mellow, then you can turn around and get the fuck outta here." (In the very next breath, Nugent dedicated a song to "all that Nashville pussy," providing a band name two decades later.) It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that large chunks of the alterna-rock generation took Nugent's message to heart. Even when you play unplugged, you can be tense and moody, you can be wry and ironic, you can be intense and emotional -- but for God's sake, don't be mellow.

Which brings us to Pullman's debut album, Turnstyles & Junkpiles (out this week on Thrill Jockey). It is, without apologies, a mellow album -- and an unlikely one when you consider the source. The all-acoustic line-up comprises Come's Chris Brokaw, Tortoise's Douglas McCombs, Bundy K. Brown of the New York band Direction in Music, and Curtis Harvey of Rex. The ingredients were there for a noise-jam supersession, but instead this quartet made a back-porch kind of guitar album that harks back to the likes of Leo Kottke and Jorma Kaukonen. There's a lot of folksy fingerpicking, a bit of good-natured soundtrack kitsch (on the Italian-styled "Lysnya"), and Brokaw's first recorded appearance on banjo. Instead of doing the obvious thing and shading the music with dark undertones, Pullman made an album that succeeds on its own modest terms. You can play it over cappuccino on a lazy Sunday morning without breaking the mood.

"I have no problem with that," Brokaw insists. "This may sound like a copout, but pretty music is easier to do if it's instrumental. Once you throw vocals into it, you run a much higher risk of getting ungodly sentimental. There is one solo tune I did on the album, `Beacon & Kent,' which sounds to me like something Come would have done. But overall, yeah -- there is a pretty relaxed and upbeat feel to it, which I'm perfectly happy with."

Perhaps that's because the disc was made under such upbeat and happy circumstances, though in a city loft rather than on a country back porch. Having played together in different combinations in the past (Brown was in an interim line-up of Come), the players got together last winter in Tortoise's Chicago loft, which was a hotbed of band activity. "It was fun to do, because there was so much going on," says Brokaw. "We were rehearsing in the kitchen, another Tortoise offshoot called Isotope 217 was rehearsing in the other room, McIntyre was recording the new Spinanes album. We did the whole thing in about five days and didn't leave the loft the whole time. The four of us would literally sit around the kitchen table of the Tortoise loft, work on a song for a few hours, go into Bundy's bedroom and record it, then cook and eat. There was a lot of eating involved."

Brokaw had dabbled in acoustic music before, but the planets apparently conspired to keep anything from getting turned out. "I used to play acoustic guitar a lot more, and I had a bouzouki as well. That really stopped because I gave away my 12-string to a friend for his birthday, then I had to sell the bouzouki because I was broke. Then I got another acoustic; it fell over and it broke. I bought a Spanish guitar while I was in Spain with Come, and I got to play it on one song for this record. And I played some banjo, even though I don't know how. There were songs where I thought the tone of a banjo would be right, so I had to spend an hour or two figuring out how it worked."

Pullman's grouping was so informal that they have no plan to play together again; the closest they'll come is a duo show by Brokaw and Harvey at T.T. the Bear's Place this coming Tuesday. But Brokaw has other uncharacteristic doings in store: he's begun work on a pop album with former Absolute Grey leader Mitchell Rasor. And it's likely that the next Come album will be an acoustic set with piano and strings, recalling the cabaret-styled shows they did in early '97, before they shifted back to electric mode for Gently Down the Stream.

SIX FINGER SATELLITE

When Providence's Six Finger Satellite bought their first synthesizer a few years ago, a startling change occurred: an edgy, abrasive noise-rock outfit was transformed into . . . an edgy, abrasive noise-rock outfit with a synthesizer. When they absorbed new wave on last year's Paranormalized, SFS took on an inherently goofy form of music without breaking a smile. Unsettling as hell, the album was a necessary antidote to the cuter new-wave revival that was taking place at the time. In SFS's hands, the old Devo-esque riffs assumed a real sense of menace -- conveyed not least by the electronically doctored sound of J. Ryan's voice. You couldn't always tell what he was singing, but something in his delivery suggested you probably wouldn't want to know.

The just-released Law of Ruins (Sub Pop) represents yet another change of direction. For the most part it's vintage punk rock -- assuming your definition of punk is loose enough to include the Stooges, Jesus Lizard, and early Pere Ubu, all of whom are echoed in the lengthy grooves that provide the disc's best moments. The first half of the hour-plus CD is pure unleashing, and it hits a peak with the 12-minute "Sea of Tranquillity," a real adventure in dynamics. After a tense opening theme, the track breaks into a two-chord guitar jam (introduced by, of all things, the opening riff from the Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand") -- the jam is in turn swallowed up by a long electronic outro. The disc's second half brings out the band's moodier tendencies; there's even a twisted joke or two. The unlikely finale is a bass solo titled "Hertz So Good" and based on the tune of "Send In the Clowns." Although the disc ain't exactly sweetness and light, it doesn't have the flat-out scary moments of Paranormalized. Ryan snarls, screams, and yelps in his natural voice throughout, making the aggression a lot more approachable -- hell, even fun.

"Our last two records [Paranormalized and Severe Exposure] were all about brute force; this one seems a little melancholy to me," notes bassist James Apt. "Paranormalized was an incredibly shrill, tense record, but that's how we were feeling at the time. The new one seems a little sadder, maybe that's just a by-product of the aging process. We don't always make the meanings clear, but you don't have to know what a song is about to like it." And the nature of the lyrics? "Mostly love and alienation, from what I can tell. At this point I can't imagine anybody's going to come up with a shockingly new lyric." Despite recent rumors, Apt says the band are not breaking up: for a time their rained-out gig at the Central Square World's Fair was reported to be their last show, but they're at the Middle East on the 22nd with a tour to follow.

How did the bass solo come about? "As a joke, originally. In one sense it's preposterous, but it makes sense to us. The title's there because I don't think a bass solo should have a pretentious title, and I didn't want to call it something like `Improvisation No. 32' -- we're not Tortoise, for chrissakes. There's always been a sense of humor on our albums, but maybe it's not as evident as we think." So is there more warmth in SFS's music than some might surmise? "Nope," Apt deadpans. "I think we can be nice as people, but that doesn't come through in our music and it doesn't have to. It seems a lot of bands pay too much attention to whether the audience likes them or not, but I don't need to know whether or not Jerry Lee Lewis is a good person. Plenty of great music has been made by total shits, though I hear that the Ben Folds Five are nice guys."

GROOVASAURUS SPLIT

It's not often that a popular band will call it quits without some fanfare or even an official farewell gig, but Groovasaurus quietly knocked it on the head last week. A few days after a headline show at T.T. the Bear's Place, the band circulated a terse e-mail reading "Groovasaurus is no more, RIP." Reached a few days later, singer Anita Suhanin said, "There wasn't any big fight, it was just time for us to do other things. We've all known each other for years and will remain friends, honestly." Suhanin is still playing with Schwang, which she describes as "a mellow kind of dreamy, cryin'-in-your-beer torch-song thing"; and she'll appear in this guise at the Lizard Lounge tonight (Thursday). Meanwhile drummer Mike Piehl has joined Expanding Man, and he's off to Los Angeles to start pre-production on their upcoming album.

XTC ON TVT

Ending years of speculation about when or whether they'd release another album, UK pop icons XTC announced last week that they're signing with the TVT label. Which is somewhat ironic, since XTC have had some well-publicized fights with record labels in the past, and TVT has had some equally well-publicized fights with artists (notably Nine Inch Nails and the now-defunct Boston band Fledgling). Five years in the making, the next XTC album -- whose working titles have included Firework and A History of the Middle Ages -- has a troubled history. Guitarist Dave Gregory resigned during the sessions, leaving singer/writer/guitarist Andy Partridge and singer/writer/bassist Colin Moulding as the band's only members. They've been simultaneously working on two batches of material, the first orchestral and the second guitar-based. These were originally slated as a double album, but the current plan is for TVT to release the orchestral album in January and the rock-oriented set the following fall.

COMING UP

Slow River artist John Rouse has his disc-release party at the Middle East tonight (Thursday), with Lullaby for the Working Class and Hub Moore. Austin rockers Spoon are at T.T.'s, roots-guitar vet Lonnie Brooks is at Harpers Ferry, and the Curtain Society, Lumen, and Curious Ritual are all at the Linwood. And in the weird booking of the week, the Marshall Tucker Band play the Harp . . . The Gravel Pit headline the Middle East tomorrow (Friday), the Lyres and Kenne Highland shake up Club Bohemia, Michelle Willson is at Johnny D's, and Slide play the Lizard Lounge with Rich Gilbert's new side project the Cornet Premiers . . . Critical faves Grant Lee Buffalo are at Karma Club Saturday, the Gigolo Aunts and the Pills are at T.T.'s, Mung and Razorwire are at the Middle East, New Orleans bluesman John Mooney is at the House of Blues, and it's a rockabilly night at the Linwood with the Raging Teens and the Bourbonaires . . . Cult hero-turned-movie-star Jonathan Richman begins three nights at the Middle East Monday . . . And the divinely decadent "Marlene Loses It" cabaret continues at the Lizard Wednesday.