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Tenement Halls, "Knitting Needles & Bicycle Bells"
This is the first solo album from former lead for Rock*A*Teens, a bandso good that they will be forever underrated no matter how many times they’repegged as the archetypal underrated band.Merge
People will pan this record. The title is pretty bad; even the bandtitle I don’t really like. Probably it should have been called “ChrisLopez” because this is Chris Lopez’s music, just like all thosebrilliant Rock*A*Teens albums. The Rock*A*Teens who haunted my youth,who like O’Connor and Faulkner and Walker Percy and Barry Hannah had anew world language to create but hadn’t yet because everything from theSouth happens that way. Who came from some imagined Cabbagetown outsideAtlanta with nothing but burned-out cars, streets full of shingles andthe only roofed structures the empty airplane hangers where teenscovered in reverb blasted science fiction rockabilly up to streetlightsmistaken for spotlights that were in fact searchlights, as theDestroyer’s one-sheet would have it. Eventually the teens grew out of“I’m Your Puppet” covers and into reinterpreting the classics throughan even foggier lens, meant to include southern soap opera romantics,abstract car accidents and huge aerial visions of the American state,macro-dramas condensed into 18’s white-boy soul stretches and yelpedout as if this-here-were the last song he/I will play and you/I willever hear. The band was struck down, and Lopez stayed on. Once he was“doomed,” as Bejar would have it again, but today he is still alive.Tenement Halls are no teenage tenement film reel. There is notelevision; no one is hunched over bad cooking; no one is beaten orbeating; no corpse goes weeks without being noticed. It sounds like theRock*A*Teens woke from their dream, Lopez got sad about it, so he’swriting songs to ignore it. Every song here is about love and duration;every voice in every song is love-sick. There is less of the teenagecamaraderie gung-ho-we’re-doomed! atmosphere, less concern for what’soutside that window. Songs about Charlemagne and swifts coming homecover a man’s version of love, fitted to Memphis traditions, with theair of Byzantine myth. Lyrics are simpler, much less ambitious thatLopez’s days with the Teens, even at their youngest, but, somehow, theyfeel more genuinely desperate. There are less theatrics and lessreverb, but you can hear the voices of teens grown up and still in thesame place; it’s sad but an essential part of that legacy. It’s lessfun; there’s less escape, less songs about AM radio, death jazz orCherry Red compilations, despite the title’s easygoing. Maybe havingextreme reverence for the Rock*A*Teens is necessary for enjoyingKnitting Needles; maybe it is a maturity issue. All I know is that timeis such a part of these lyrics that it’s impossible not to think abouta past with this music, any past. That’s fine; I wouldn’t have wantedit came without a fight anyway. Keep on, Christopher Lopez, you arestill needed. Bonus: even though the record was played and producedalmost entirely by Lopez, it’s still got some of thatwall-of-sludgy-reverb-Rock*A*Teens sound.
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