a grammar

So Natalie Merchant has this new album, on which she sets poems (by people like Christina Rossetti) to music (involving people like Wynton Marsalis). Not sure what to say about that.

Funny, though, because her band was setting poems by Wilfred Owen to music 30 years ago, only back then they were giant waver weirdos on a Horrors of War kick. Honest: their reputation wound up elsewhere, but when they started off, in the early 80s, in upstate New York, 10,000 Maniacs were pretty weird. Every now and then I wind up getting re-attached to the particular weirdness collected in their first recordings, which pull wildly and happily from dub reggae, new-wave, west-African guitar, post-punk, and Merchant’s college course schedule. (You can practically figure out which classes she’s taking from the lyrics.)

And during most of these moments of re-attachment, I realize more and more that the late Rob Buck was a seriously great and ahead-of-the-game guitar player. He is also the reason I feel weird playing a Les Paul without hiking it all the way up to my chest.

This new-wave noisemaking is “My Mother, the War,” as played during an early-80s TV appearance in the UK. (“Death of Manolete” and “Katrina’s Fair” were pretty good, too.)