| Ani DiFranco once said that the chief
difference between rock musicians and folk musicians is that rockers take nothing
seriously but them- selves, and folkies take everything seriously but them-
selves. When she said that, she was obviously thinking more about Kurt Cobain's
gloomy disciples than the ever growing battalions of the self-deprecating Quirk Rock
genre--that mirthfully trivial club which includes They Might Be Giants, the B-52s, King
Missle, and legions of other intentionally odd bands famous for a bizarre sense of humor
which mocks itself from behind an implacable poker face.
Chicago's latest inductee to the Quirk Pop club is Berber, the buoyant brainchild of
one-time acoustic singer-songwriter Michael Cummins. While DiFranco might suppose that
Berber's self-deprecating silliness can be attributed to Cummin's days in the folk coffee
shops of Chicago, you won't hear much folkiness in the band's bubbly-catchy melodies,
simple-but-serious electric jangle arrangements, or in the straight-faced intentional
inanity of their lyrics (the one indispensable characteristic of all Quirk Pop bands).
It's clear that Cummin's aesthetic ancestors have less in common with Woody Guthrie than
with fellow Quirksters like the Judybats, Boo Radleys, Cracker and Camper Van
Beethoven.
"Sure," says berber guitarist Paul Hietko after I ramble off the names on that
list. "We like all those bands." He cites the sometimes quirky
art-pop of the Velvet Underground and the Pixies as the band's top conscious influences.
"We're all fans of pop rock," he says. "We like very short, poppy
catchy stuff." And berber does short, poppy and catchy with serious
proficiency. The hooks are instantly memorable, the arrangements simple but
assertively un- boring. Electric Guitarists Cummins and Hietko strum away at easy C,
D and G chords with no more embarrassment than Buddy Holly, correctly confident in the
magnetism of their tunes to sustain audience interest. Meanwhile, most songs have a
single, simple idea to make the arrangement more interesting, whether it be an
undercurrent of thick buzz, an anthemic guitar descant, a gritty Liz Phair loop.
This kind of pop minimalism suits their laid-back silliness quite well.
Cummins shows a gift for snappily metered wordplay, but his refusal to take himself and
his frothy pop too seriously suggests a kind of punkesque laziness. Some of the
songs (such as "Rend" and "Knees") attempt some serious poetry and
wordcraft. More often, though, Cummins seems to be spinning whatever words come to
the top of his head, which results in some charmingly drippy lines like "you drove a
car into my wife/now I'm s--- out of luck" and "we'll always be together even
when the weather's not pretty/We'll always be together, even when the weather is
sh---y." As with many Quirk Pop bands, there's an apparent
contradiction between Berber's self-deprecating triviality and its affinity for the
literary (the album title is a reference to J.D. Salinger; the liner notes feature a poem
by Chicago's eccentric poet Thax Douglas). This is less surprising in light of the
genre's roots, which can be traced astoundingly quickly to the Dadaists of the 1920s,
whose self-effacing absurdity ridiculed the pointlessness of art. Their
sense of humor went on to influence the avante-guard of the 1960s, which, in turn,
influenced bands like the Velvet Underground and They Might Be Giants. Like most of
the artists in the Dada lineage, Quirk Popsters sometimes emphasize silliness for its own
sake, and other times use the bizarre humor to explore serious themes. Berber seems
to tend toward the former, but shows both tendencies.
My observations on the lyrics, I should point out, are based on the limited instances when
the words are understandable. After recording the album, the band decided the songs
sounded best with Cummin's cartoon-like nasal vocals mixed as low as possible. Hietko says
they felt it made for a more "mysterious" sound, but it sometimes makes the
words inaudible. Fortunately, it also de-emphasizes Cummin's half-baked, occasionally
offkey warbling (at times his lazy delivery of bouncy melodies distinctly recalls Graham
"Suggs" McPherson of Madness, a British forerunner of the Quirk Pop
movement. On "Modla Lane," Cummins even slips briefly into a Camden Town
cockney). With the vocals further down in the mix, the listener is more likely to be
charmed by his offbeat chipmunkery than annoyed by the obvious lack of technical
skill.
But then, technical skill is obviously not one of Berber's top assets. The music has
reportedly become more polished than in the past, with the arrangements conforming better
to the tight structuring of Cummin's songwriting. In large measure, though, the
"polish" is a matter of turning weaknesses into assets: weak vocals become
amusingly sloppy; unambitiously minimalist arrangements avoid any risky complexity. The
band has an obvious gift for sweet catchy pop. It will be interesting to see what
happens to their audio sugar as it continues to be refined.
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