Neon shares members with Mozart, and while Mozart sounds loose and wild, Neon sounds almost like they’ve never heard punk rock before, like they’re making it up on the spot. I don’t really understand the way the beats work, the melodies are consistently surprising, and the individual elements clash against one another in ways that feel almost totally chaotic, but it’s played deliberately enough that no one would mistake it for nonsense. Anyway, I write about this little personal journey because Neon, to me, sounds like hardcore punk that is completely free. While these forms operate with their own sets of rules and conventions, the frameworks these groups work within feel wider in scope and more filled with possibility at the very least, I’m unfamiliar enough with those possibilities that they feel really new and exciting. However, lately I’ve just wanted to listen to music that is really free… I’ve been listening to more jazz, soundtracks, prog, and other forms of music that feel less regimented than punk rock. You’d think that I would have noticed before, but I listened to this kind of music so exclusively that I honestly barely even considered anything that operated outside of the standard rock framework music at all.
Neon: Neon Is Life cassette (self-released) It’s only recently that I’ve come to the realization that most of the music that I listen to is extraordinarily stiff and regimented. Maybe if you focused on the winner and/or the spoils you’d be on firmer footing. you have to win something-and both of these tracks omit any discernible object… they’re just about “winning” in general.
Is there something in the word “winning”-whether it’s the sense of the word or just the sound-that makes it difficult to write a good song around? My only hunch is that winning is usually a transitive verb-meaning that it takes an object, i.e. As was the case with Leatherface’s track, I have a particular least favorite moment: at about the 1:50 mark, when Borland pronounces the word “win-ay-EEEENG.” Again, the word seems jammed uncomfortably into the melody, and has always struck out to me as a bump in the road on an otherwise outstanding album. Like Stubbs, Borland wrenches and stretches the word, often adding in multiple extra syllables in order to bend the word into a melody. It’s not an offense against music or anything, it’s just an idea that doesn’t really come together, which only sticks out because pretty much every other idea on this record does come together.Īnother great songwriter, Adrian Borland of the Sound, also struggles with prosody as he attacks the theme of “Winning” on the album From the Lion’s Mouth. My least favorite is the iteration that comes at about 1:37, when the two enunciations of the titular word are bridged together with a hissy scream that could have come from a Carcass record, the overdubbed scream overlapping slightly with the words on each side. Despite the varied approaches, he never really lands on one that works.
In the chorus, Frankie Stubbs sings the word “Winning” twice in close succession, and he experiments with different phrasings for the lyric throughout the song. I actually really like the song’s catchy main riff-it’s pretty much classic Leatherface-but something about the way the syllables are drawn out across the chorus has always been like nails on a chalkboard to me. Admittedly, it would have been hard to keep the cresting wave of the record’s previous three songs-“Not a Day Goes By,” “Not Superstitious,” and “Springtime”-going forever, but “Winning” is a steep drop, particularly since Mush is marred by few other dicey choices. That is, with the exception of the track “Winning,” which has always been my least favorite on the album. There’s a good ten-year stretch during which I would have called Mush my favorite album, and while it doesn’t quite hit as hard for me as it did during my early 20s, it’s still a great album that never fails to bring a smile to my face. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how much time I’ve spent with Mush in my life.
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