A Trip to Marineville

Cacophonous and anarchic, imbued with an insular irony, and inspired equally by punk primitivism and Krautrock experimentalism, the Swell Maps pioneered a hyper-intelligent yet unforgivingly amateurish approach to music-making that sounds now like a blueprint for all the aspiring art-school noisemakers that came in their wake. Never popular, always marginal, the band seemed to have operated with a sublime indifference to any potential audience they might have had, which makes them a contrarian's dream, the perfect band to listen to in order to indulge one's masochism and sullen anti-social tendencies at the same time, all without surrendering the cachet attached to being into something obscure that's not overtly silly. Because their records have been relatively hard to track down, the band acquired a path-breaking reputation perhaps out of proportion to their actual accomplishments, but now that it’s been reissued by Secretly Canadian (with a few bonus tracks and video material tacked on, but not with the integral singles "Read About Seymour" and "Let's Build a Car"), you'll be able to evaluate their bastard punk prog for yourself.

Released in 1979, the band's first full-length album, A Trip to Marineville (the title was taken from an episode of "Stingray") is slightly more accessible, but not because it has all that many hooks or melodies or anything like that. Swell Maps approach to song-writing involves pounding out a riff or chord progression over and over again (on chunky, thickly distorted guitars or on a piano) while unexpected noises and abstruse, sullenly intoned vocals are layered on top. Borrowing much from the loosely structured jams of Can, this strategy would ultimately be adopted by bands like Flipper and the Germs. Impenetrable at first, songs quickly grow on you, if only through their sheer repetition, their relentless momentum. On the cover is a photo of a house on fire, very appropriate to how the album opens, with well-orchestrated burst of three short, explosive tracks that run together seamlessly: the sneering "H.S. Art", which repeatedly asks "Do you believe in art?" with such scorn that it's clear you don't if you have to stop and ask; the metacritique of "Another Song", which seems to question its own right to exist as it co-opts pop-song formula, and the concise, incisive "Vertical Slum". The rest of the album eschews such tight focus, and progressively becomes more difficult listening. Songs that begin with crisp, throbbing riffs and well-layered guitars ("Midget Submarines" and "Harmony in Your Bathroom") have endings that stretch out and devolve into chaos. And the instrumentals mount up as well, starting with the innocuous piano and found noise fragment "Don't Throw Ashtrays at Me!" and moving through the drifting, meditative "Gunboats" and climaxing with "Adventures into Basketry", a spontaneous eight-minute noise fest that sounds like an autistic drum circle conducted during an air raid. This discursive experiment in discord certainly sound liberating for the band, but if you can't get lost in the accidental textures of random noises colliding and patterns disintegrating, if you can't get off vicariously on their freedom, you'll probably grow impatient with it all. More successful is "Full Moon in My Pocket" and "Blam!!" which are really one song, an extended homage to the quintessential Can epic, "Mother Sky". Using staccato bass notes to punctuate a fluid groove and elliptical lyrics to invite abstruse speculation, these songs are perhaps the closest Swell Maps comes to achieving an effective synthesis of deliberate artistry and open-endedness, suggesting for a few sublime moments that these are natural complements to each other.

Rob Horning

Ripped from the 2007 Mute Europe release with bonus tracks to FLAC

Swell Maps; A Trip to Marineville

1.      H.S.art

2.      Another Song

3.      Vertical Slum

4.      Spitfire Parade

5.      Harmony In Your Bathroom

6.      Don’t Through Ashtrays At Me!

7.      Midget Submarines

8.      Bridge Head (Pt.9)

9.      Full Moon In My Pocket

10.   BLAM!!

11.   Full Moon (Reprise)

12.   Gunboats

13.   Adventuring Into Basketry

14.   My Little Shops

15.   Ripped & Torn

16.   International Rescue

17.   Loin Of The Surf

18.   Shoot The Angels

19.   Elephant Flowers (No.2)

20.   Turn Me On Dead Man

21.   Bronze And Baby Shoes

22.   Nevertoseeanyotherway

You can find the compilation International Rescue here