By Berlinda Recacho
Almost halfway through their new album, Kelley Deal and Mike Montgomery conclude a duet of rolling percussion, thumping bass lines, and crunchy guitar riffs singing a statement: "I consider myself very likeable/I consider myself." What might come off as a humblebrag in the mouths of others is transformed into an earnest appeal: "I like, therefore I am." This seems to be the ethos of R. Ring, Deal and Montgomery's collaboration. After a fortuitous meeting in the studio in 2011, they clicked and discovered they liked playing music with each other, so they kept on doing it, releasing singles, gathering these into a compilation, touring Europe.
War Poems, We Rested is their first collection of new songs in six years, and it feels fresh and familiar at the same time, like you were lucky to catch them playing a short set live in a tiny club before they were famous but you can’t remember if it was in the 1990s or now and then you think you might have dreamed it, but fortunately, it's real.
[Kenixfan: I did indeed do something almost just like that, back in 2017 at Comet Ping Pong, and here's a pic.]
In R. Ring's 2013 interview with Pop Matters, Kelley Deal recounted an anecdote from the Nineties when she was in rehab: her halfway house required her to get a job, so she applied at the local record store. She received a callback right away, but upon arriving at the store – as a customer – she found her application tacked up on the store bulletin board like an effigy with unkind words scrawled about her twin sister Kim (bassist/vocalist of The Pixies) and a pronouncement that the record store was not going to hire Kim Deal's sister. Ever. Kelley Deal could have been bitter, but chose to be matter-of-fact about the meanness of the supposedly reverent. When you've co-led a band with said twin (The Breeders), and been the front woman for your own project (The Kelley Deal 6000) what else do you have to prove, and to whom? In support, band-mate Mike Montgomery (a music producer and a member of Ampline) appealed for record stores to be more like libraries, checking judgment and snobbery at the door. Why can't music just be created, and enjoyed without worrying about whether it's cool or on-trend? If you knew better, you wouldn't be in it for the money, although both artists acknowledged the presence of countless would-be next-big-things waiting in the wings for their 15 minutes of something.
When you let go of fame and fortune as the destination, perhaps you can enjoy the journey for what it is: the most important part of the experience. The word "amateur" derives from the Latin root "amo", meaning "to love". With all the respective and shared history between them, Deal and Montgomery are not amateurs, but they have approached their side hustle with the verve of two people making music and having fun in the moment. In the logic of the music business, bankable singles are released to drive the album. R. Ring's collection feels more studied. There's an irreverence that is not guided by an algorithm to maximize airplay. Listen if you want, we hope you like it. Or not. We're still going to be doing what we're doing.
Clocking in at 28 minutes, War Poems, We Rested is succinct. None of the eleven tracks is longer than four minutes, but each second is used to its advantage, wandering around on schedule between the bookends of start and stop. The opener, "Still Life" pulls apart like a gaudy stage curtain to reveal a wall of sound, with Deal performing her version of a torch song by way of the lead singer of a girl group who gets to say what she really thinks 30 years later. Her tarry, feathery voice intones: "All I want is a cigarette/and someone to pay the rent/An easy road, a slow detox/Slow drip pillow talk." Does the title refer to the arrangement of inanimate objects for artists to draw and paint, or existence as it always was? She's not telling.
One of the delights of this curated tour is the eclectic span of style and tempo. A funky, dance-able chant like "Def Sup" ("Put your hands in the air/Put your feet on the street/Put your lips on my lips/Where'd you say we should meet") precedes the spooky, somnambulistic call-and-response of "Embers on a Sleepwalk" then shifts back into the irresistible indictment of "Volunteer", where Montgomery tips his hat to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It's fun to imagine how they got the effects — digitally most likely — but I like to picture him actually singing through a vacuum hose to create the distance between his voice and our ears. Deal takes the lead on one song, then hands the mic to Montgomery. A song may even have more than one personality: In "Stole Eye" Montgomery's shoegaze-y intro trips past itself to a rousing and unexpected conclusion. "Cartoon Heart/Build Me a Question" takes a bright, pop melody and peppers it with the third degree. Deal demands, "Where did you go when my family failed/What did you do with my stuff?/What is the smell of your favorite song/ What's up with your crooked leg?" However, the final query replaces slapstick with a reality check: "Can a cartoon heart/cartoon heart/break?"
In "Hug", with the lyrics, "Don't want a hug/Hey, I'm talking to you", Deal seems to be channeling the energy and fervor of her sister's iconic band at the height of its powers. I used to wonder what it would be like if Kim Deal got to sing lead on more songs with The Pixies; The Breeders answered that question. As identical twins, Kelley and Kim have similar voices, but rather than other musical sisters who sing harmonies, they double-tracked in real time. In the gentle, shimmering "Exit Music", Deal incants a twin lullaby of two voices stumbling together, shaking, kicking the life into you, recalling birth and reflecting on mortality. The weight of sorrow is inversely proportional to the size of what was lost in Montgomery's stark and lovely "Lighter than A Berry": "We grew a heartbeat/And the heavy thing we carried was lighter than a berry/That we dropped/in thought of running/Faster than the fear of the unknown/There's comfort in the chaos of home." This is what happens when a real heart breaks.
It's fitting that "War Poems", the title track, closes the album without words, gentle chamber music for when the house lights come up and the crowd shuffles out. But what about the encore? If you listen to it on a loop as I did, "War Poems" feeds back into "Still Life" without a missed step and swerves into the soundtrack of your life.
War Poems, We Rested is out today on Don Giovanni Records.
[Photo: B. Smitty]