Camper Van Beethoven: El Camino Real

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: EL CAMINO REAL (2014)

1) The Ultimate Solution; 2) It Was Like That When We Got Here; 3) Classy Dames And Able Gents; 4) Camp Pendleton; 5) Dockweiler Beach; 6) Sugartown; 7) I Live In L. A.; 8) Out Like A Lion; 9) Goldbase; 10) Darken Your Door; 11) Grasshopper.

Announced as a quick thematic follow-up to La Costa Perdida, this time focused on Southern rather than Northern California, El Camino Real is in some superficial ways similar to its pre­decessor — the basic theme, the Spanish title, the cover art — but in other ways quite different: shorter, tighter, faster, poppier, sprightlier, and, on the whole, far more efficient. Apparently, churning out rootsy pop hooks is much easier for the band at this time than weaving atmospheric soundscapes of longing and yearning. Or maybe it's just that Southern California happens to ignite and inspire them far more than Northern California, for whatever reason.

In any case, El Camino Real is simply a very good pop album — perhaps the most straightfor­ward pop album they ever made, with almost every song featuring an assortment of vocal and / or instrumental hooks that matter much, much more than the words, whether those words be nos­talgic, traditional, satirical, or surrealist. Even a few songs done strictly in the generic country-western style, like ʽDarken Your Doorʼ, are funny, upbeat, and catchy; and on the whole, there's plenty of diversity, with some tracks having a punky edge, some having a blues-rock one, and some just giving you a tasty slice of the good old power-pop — like ʽCamp Pendletonʼ with a chorus line that was born to be whistled over and over, even as the song hits you with an odd case of «dark-cheerful ironic nostalgia», or the album-opening ʽUltimate Solutionʼ, shifting between muscular, stomping garage-rock riffs and lighter, violin-driven verses.

If there's a problem here, it is precisely inverse to the problem of La Costa Perdida — this time, the songs are so much pop fun, you never really get to feel any concept behind them. Perhaps the natives of South California will inadvertently have their ears glued to the lyrics, but anybody else will simply have to enjoy the music. Here's ʽDockweiler Beachʼ, kinda sounding like what would have happened if The Smiths decided to sound like The Ramones, and throw in a bit of a musical reference to the Batman theme along the way. There's ʽI Live In L. A.ʼ, kinda sounding like what would have happened if The Pogues decided to sound like The Eagles, and throw in a bit of Dylanesque harmonica to boot. There's ʽIt Was Like That When We Got Hereʼ, one minute put­ting its trust into an anthemic chorus and the next minute staking it all on a nagging blues-rock riff in the old Alvin Lee tradition. It's fun!

By the time they reach the slow, languid, folksy coda of ʽGrasshopperʼ, you might realize that each and every song has something to offer — yes, the hard-rocking songs are too deeply steeped in irony to truly kick ass, and the soft songs aren't distinctive or soulful enough to guarantee an unforgettable experience, but there's an intelligent and/or a kind-hearted sentiment in each track, a hook or two in almost each track, and, of course, the usual CvB attention to colorful detalization. I'm not sure I could or even would like to spend a lot of time describing these details, so just take my word for it: this is a really, really fun record, with a classy attitude behind it. This time, these guys aren't even trying to make something unpredictable: they just went ahead and wrote and recorded some good music for you, instead of, say, doing some ska covers of Frank Sinatra or trying to record a death metal album with nothing but cellos and violins. Bottomline: if it's any indication, I'm definitely choosing Southern over Northern California. Thumbs up.

Camper Van Beethoven: La Costa Perdida

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: LA COSTA PERDIDA (2013)

1) Come Down The Coast; 2) Too High For The Love-In; 3) You Got To Roll; 4) Someday Our Love Will Sell Us Out; 5) Peaches In The Summertime; 6) Northern California Girls; 7) Summer Days; 8) La Costa Perdida; 9) Aged In Wood; 10) A Love For All Time.

If you like your Camper Van Beethoven slow, serious, nostalgic, melancholic, and soulful, this one's for you. Now that the band members are in their fifties, chances of them reigniting the old hooligan spirit are fairly low — but it is almost as if they are consciously accelerating the matura­tion-aging process. Like New Roman Times, La Costa Perdida is another conceptual suite, but this time, it has nothing whatsoever to do with politics: most of the record reads like a symbolic love letter to their native California, soaked in nostalgia for the old days — you know, when la costa was not yet quite perdida, so to speak. The band members themselves stated that their chief influence for the record was Holland by The Beach Boys, an album whose serene, naturalistic spirit does have something in common with what they are trying to do here. Whether they suc­ceed in this is a different matter: most of the critics who still remembered CvB from the old days resorted to comparisons with Key Lime Pie, the most serious, thoughtful, and potentially boring release that they had in those old days. And these comparisons weren't always friendly.

To be perfectly honest, I like the idea and respect the attempt, but the album does bore me. It is really slow-moving (except for ʽPeaches In The Summertimeʼ, played at such a ridiculously frantic tempo that it sounds like they are seriously trying to compensate with just this one track for all the slowness around), really monotonous (introspective, brooding nostalgia permeates all the vocal and instrumental parts), and not too big on catchy hooks. Throw in the fact that Lowery is quite far from the most hypnotic performer when it comes to wearing your intellectual heart on your college suit sleeve, and what you get is something that works much better in theory than on practice — much like Key Lime Pie.

It is easy to illustrate on the example of the very first track, the country-rock waltz ʽCome Down The Coastʼ. Lisher's lead lines are colorful and sweet, Lowery's sentimental lyrics are delivered sincerely and friendly, but nothing ever rises above «adequate» — and when they get to the repetitive "come down and see me sometime" chorus, it quickly becomes too predictable and boring: how many times can you chant "[Insert four-syllable-long girl name here], come down and see me sometime" before you begin to sound like an obsessed whiner? And, needless to say, the backing harmonies are quite a far cry from the Beach Boys. Word-wise, Lowery may be getting his point across (all things may come and go, but girls and the sea shore will be here for ever), but atmosphere-wise, the song does not make much of an impression.

The same judgement, I guess, gets extrapolated over everything else here. ʽToo High For The Love-Inʼ does have a lovely set of female vocals reminiscent of certain strands of lush Europop from the Sixties, and a few pretty guitar flourishes to boot, but still overstays its welcome. The psycho-blues anthem ʽSomeday Our Love Will Sell Us Outʼ rides the same stiff groove for five minutes, briefly plunging it into pools of chaos during the coda, but its potentially mesmerizing mix of slide guitars, violins, and sitars is really so simplistic and repetitive that no true magic comes out of it. And the album's alleged centerpiece, ʽNorthern California Girlsʼ, takes on ʽHey Judeʼ-ian proportions, slipping into an anthemic coda whose two most notable features are: a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part, sounding exactly like a million distorted psychedelic solos before it, and a choral chant of "Northern Califor-nia girls, Northern Califor-nia girls" by a pack of hypnotized zombies who have long ago forgotten the meaning of that noun phrase but have been cursed to go on chanting it forever because they do not deserve any better. At least, you know, the da-da-da part on ʽHey Judeʼ was delivered with some genuine excitement.

In short, I am touched by Lowery and Co.'s feelings for their homeland, and I'm pretty sure the record will have a special appeal for all those who also happened to grow up between Stinson Beach and Arcata in the Sixties and Seventies (and maybe even later), seagulls included. But in terms of a more universal appeal, this is no Holland, and there's way too much subordination of the music to the concept. "We're old tigers / Sleeping in the sun / Dreaming of the hunt", Lowery sings on ʽSummer Daysʼ, and I guess this is really what the whole thing is about. Except that some old tigers still manage to have more vivid dreams than others, and this particular batch of old tigers sounds like it at least needs a bit more vitamins to hold your attention.

Camper Van Beethoven: New Roman Times

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: NEW ROMAN TIMES (2004)

1) Prelude; 2) Sons Of The New Golden West; 3) 51-7; 4) White Fluffy Clouds; 5) That Gum You Like Is Back In Style; 6) Might Makes Right; 7) Militia Song; 8) R'n'R Uzbekistan; 9) Sons Of The New Golden West (reprise); 10) New Roman Times; 11) The Poppies Of Balmorhea; 12) The Long Plastic Hallway; 13) I Am Talking To This Flower; 14) Come Out; 15) Los Tigres Traficantes; 16) I Hate This Part Of Texas; 17) Hippy Chix; 18) Civil Disobedience; 19) Discotheque CVB; 20) Hey Brother.

Camper Van Beethoven's «proper» comeback album must have been one of the most interesting albums of 2004 — although, apart from a few politely positive reviews in major outlets, not a lot of people ended up noticing it: the price you pay after spending your most creative and produc­tive decade as an underground semi-joke act and then disappear off the radars and stay off them while the musical world around you dies, resurrects, and forgets that you ever existed in the first place. But for those few true heroes still willing to listen, Lowery and Co. scramble together a project that has got to count as their most serious undertaking ever.

See for yourself: New Roman Times, referring not so much to the serif typeface that I am using to write this review as to the idea that with the election of George W. Bush, humanity may have regressed two thousand years back in its evolution (hey, not my idea — address all your indigna­tion to David Charles Lowery, San Antonio, Texas!), is a concept album... nay, actually, is a full-fledged rock opera that tells you the story of a disintegrated United States of America, in which the protagonist finds himself fluctuating between the gung-ho Republic of Texas and the free-thinking, but predictably decadent and wobbly Republic of California — now serving as a fervent volunteer in the Texas army, now seduced by the easy-livin', drug-heavy lifestyle of the West Coast, and finally going nuts over the whole thing and becoming a religious fundamentalist (the last song is allegedly about his self-indoctrination for suicide bombing). Rich enough for you?

And if the storyline itself does not suffice, then how about the music — eclectically drawing upon all the different strands of CvB's past, from country to ska to punk to pop, and throwing in some additional inspirations as well, such as progressive rock and heavy metal that they had largely shunned before 2004? The album is fairly long, but not at the expense of constantly recycling the same ideas — no two tracks, except for occasional reprises of themes, really sound alike, and most reflect a good deal of thought process and studio work invested in them. Of course, CvB were never a «lazy» band, but everything they did so far since their reunion had a certain throw­away flavor to it; well, no more — you can listen to New Roman Times six or seven times in a row and still have certain things left undiscovered about it.

Diverse, intelligent, unpredictable, humorous, well-produced, so what is there not to like? Well, as far as I am concerned — that seems to be just the problem. Camper Van Beethoven were many things in their lives, but they were never Pink Floyd, and this record is just too Floyd-ian for them, or, if you want a comparison that would be a tiny bit more accurate from a musical point of view as well, too Rush-like. In theory, these songs are well-written and professionally executed, but they aren't fun. It's as if the boys are so deeply driven by the concept that they take things far more seriously than they should, and this reflects badly on the music, because the band members are neither instrumental virtuosos nor melodic geniuses, and the best CvB material had always relied on nonchalance, nihilism, humor, and hooks to get by. New Roman Times, in comparison to that, tends to drag and sag far more often than could be deemed acceptable.

Things go bad already on the first track, ʽSons Of The New Golden Westʼ, which sounds like a cross between Larks/Red-era King Crimson (same tricky time signatures, guitar-violin interplay, general doomy heaviness, etc.) and modern brands of art-metal (especially in terms of guitar solo work). I mean, it's not bad, but... do we really need that? It sounds like a tightly focused, serious­ly disciplined, almost math-rock-compatible piece of work, but focus and discipline at the ex­pense of fun was never an ideological concern for CvB, so why start now? And there's much more of the same ilk, even when the vocals arrive — ʽWhite Fluffy Cloudsʼ, for instance, is a full-fledged prog-metal workout, again, not a bad one, but these guys are too professorial to de­liver a proper ass-kicking attitude.

They can still do some interesting things, even by reviving disco (ʽDiscotheque CVBʼ) and crossing it with drum machines and lyrical lead guitar, but they all sound more interesting on paper than in reality. Meanwhile, their classic ska schtick, as they rewind it on ʽMight Makes Rightʼ and the near-instrumental ʽLos Tigres Traficantesʼ, is reduced to the role of an old friend that still pops in for a drink or two, but has nothing new to tell you anyway.

In the end, the only song that properly «gets» me is the album-closing ʽHey Brotherʼ. Beginning with a "hey..." that you half-expect to be followed by "...Jude", it quickly becomes a moving soul number, only for you to discover, horrifyingly, within half a minute that it is the anthem of a suicidal terrorist — making this the only example I know of a tune where the "soul brotherhood" idea is cruelly turned on its head; but then again, why not? They make a great point here, namely, that deeply felt religious fervor that fuels so many great soul and gospel tunes can just as easily be associated with violence and the destructive side of religion, rather than the peace-and-love aspect. I have no idea if they ever do the song live — it is very inviting to sing along, but you'd be basically singing along to a declaration of faith by a 9/11 plane hijacker. Had something like this been released by a major band, there'd probably be a huge PC scandal all over the world — but I guess there are certain advantages to holding on to your underground status for decades.

That said, the audacity of ʽHey Brotherʼ does not redeem the album as a whole. It is just too heavy, and I don't mean the musical sound — I mean, it sounds as if it all came from the brain of a mathematics / social science professor (I guess Lowery is one, in a sense, given his math cre­den­tials), and everything is too detached and clinical for my tastes. I give it a thumbs up without hesitation — the concept is interesting and somewhat original, and there's so much stuff here that I will probably want to revisit the record again, and, most importantly, this is one of those come­back efforts where the artist is dead set on pushing boundaries rather than settle into a comfor­table rocking chair. But ultimately, it's like an anti-utopian novel set to music where the message and the symbolism are more important than raw feeling — and so, a modern day Quadrophenia this daring rock opera is not. Good smack in the mouth of the American society circa 2004, though, and every bit as relevant in 2017.

Camper Van Beethoven: Tusk

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: TUSK (2002)

1) Over And Over; 2) The Ledge; 3) Think About Me; 4) Save Me A Place; 5) Sara; 6) What Makes You Think You're The One; 7) Storms; 8) That's All For Everyone; 9) Not That Funny; 10) Sisters Of The Moon; 11) Angel; 12) That's Enough For Me; 13) Brown Eyes; 14) Never Make Me Cry; 15) I Know I'm Not Wrong; 16) Honey Hi; 17) Beautiful Child; 18) Walk A Thin Line; 19) Tusk; 20) Never Forget.

The liner notes to the album will inform you that the idea of covering Fleetwood Mac's Tusk in its entirety goes back to 1987, when the band recorded an original set of demo tapes but then decided to lay off the project. However, since no well-documented evidence exists for the fact, it is commonly assumed by the wise ones that this is just one of the many self-concocted myths around the band — and anyway, who cares? There is no doubt that Camper Van Beethoven, a band that lives in its own time frame, could have done this in 1987, in 1997, in 2017, heck, any place in time (would be a little hard to do it prior to 1979, but with these guys, nothing is ever completely impossible).

Anyway, while this particular move for the reassembled band was naturally unpredictable, it is not as totally «unnatural» as if they'd wanted to, say, come out with a bunch of Aphex Twin covers. Their penchant for surrealistically re-inventing old school material, from Floyd to Zep­pelin, was already well known; and when you think of it, there's quite a bit they have in common with Lindsey Buckingham — the inborn pop instincts, the diverse bag of influences ranging from pop to hard rock to folk / country / bluegrass, and the experimental drive that never allows these influences to drag the music down to the level of bland imitation. Even the choice of Tusk over all the other Fleetwood Mac albums is logical in a way — just as nobody expected an odd, chao­tic, experimental, and ultra-long record from Fleetwood Mac after Rumours, so did nobody expect the new CvB to cover all of it as their first «proper» new album in twelve years.

Of course, a post-modern take on an album that already had its share of post-modern moments in the first place is never going to make the annals in the status of a masterpiece. Understanding and even enjoying this new Tusk is hardly an autonomous task — it is useless to try and listen to it not only if you are unfamiliar with the original Tusk, but even if you are unfamiliar with Camper van Beethoven's classic period albums: it simply does not exist outside of its context. But even in context, it is not easy to understand what it is. It is not a «tribute» — many of the songs have been mutated almost beyond recognition — but neither is it a «parody», because they obviously love the source material, and besides, CvB were never a parody act. Mostly, it is about breaking as many rules as possible, and replacing them with one simple rule: Change The Vibe!

This rule is most evident when it comes to covering songs that were written and performed by Christine McVie (the starry-eyed sentimental ballads) and Stevie Nicks (the Ice Queen quasi-Goth doom-laden epics). With McVie, they go easy on the little moments of deep beauty (such as the desperate "could it really, really be..." melodic plunge on ʽOver And Overʼ), but take her to task hard on everything else — ʽThink About Meʼ is transformed into a pop-punk screamfest, ʽBrown Eyesʼ is made to sound like an industrialized Cabaret Voltaire number, ʽNever Make Me Cryʼ is now a lethargic psycho-folk dirge, ʽHoney Hiʼ is the product of a balalaika busker playing at a busy street intersection, and ʽNever Forgetʼ is turned into a lo-fi outtake from a fictional Neutral Milk Hotel recording session. In other words, we love your songs, Christine, but they could use some transplanting — it's just too boring when all of them are delivered in the same style. Don't you know that punk rockers, industrial grinders, street buskers, and batshit crazy indie kids have sentimental feelings, too?

With Stevie, it actually looks as if they don't like her songs all that much — most of them are as close as the album really comes to parody level. On ʽSaraʼ, they lay on so many sonic overdubs and so much echo on the vocals that it is clear — they are taking every precaution so as not to give the false impression that they are taking any of those lyrics seriously. ʽStormsʼ is dominated by a seriously out-of-tune violin track (we are verbally warned about this in the intro to the song) that makes it hard to focus on any other aspect of the song. The most hilarious surgery is being done on ʽSisters Of The Moonʼ, though, transformed into a synth-pop dirge with «robotic» female vocals delivering the lyrics in a thoroughly perfunctory and impassionate manner — in fact, towards the end of the song the «robot» actually breaks down and begins spouting broken bits from various quotations (ranging from "call me Ishmael" to "this one goes to eleven" to "fuck me harder"), implying that you probably wouldn't feel the difference anyway. I would sure love to learn Stevie's reaction to that one — there was a time when her performance of ʽSistersʼ took on quite a religious aspect on stage, but then, she always did have a sense of humor.

Working their magic over Buckingham's songs is a bit more difficult, considering how distinctly weird many of those were in the first place — and try as they might, they are not going to make songs like ʽThe Ledgeʼ or ʽI Know I'm Not Wrongʼ any weirder. All that's possible is to add a few more extravagant touches here and there — use some bagpipes on ʽI Know I'm Not Wrongʼ, some lazifying vocal distortion and a bit of trombone on ʽSave Me A Placeʼ, or insert a surrep­titious lyrical reference to the B-52's ʽRock Lobsterʼ in ʽNot That Funnyʼ (is this an implication  that the B-52's were «not that funny» or what?). The only spot where they pull all the stops is the title track — here, gloriously extended to a whoppin' ten-minute length and made into something much bigger than the original; in fact, this is probably the only song here that would merit inclu­sion on any representative CvB anthology, as it turns into a bombastic psychedelic jam with a chaotic noise section (at times, calling to mind ʽRevolution #9ʼ rather than any Fleetwood Mac track) and an extended series of drony guitar solos, all tied together with the classic dance-style ʽTuskʼ bass line. If you ever thought that the original ʽTuskʼ fizzled out way too soon (and I know I did), this inter­pretation of it might be right up your alley.

So what would be the final judgement? I think that as an idea, this track-for-track cover of Tusk is a cool one — despite the inevitable flaws in the individual realizations of particular tracks. As a «meta-artistic» gesture rather than an actual platter of emotional entertainment, this is hardly an album that you will want to listen to more than once unless you have "I'm not like everybody else" engraved in chicken shit over your front door, but it is a stimulating gesture all the same, and it is fascinating to observe all the huge effort that went into it — plus, as an obsessive com­pletist, I actually find myself fascinated with the determination to cover every single song on a double album (when they could have easily stuck to just their favourite Buckingham tunes, for instance, not necessarily just from Tusk). So, a thumbs up it is, after all, but now, if you excuse me, I feel a craving for the original coming on, and so should you, probably.

Camper Van Beethoven: Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead - Long Live Camper Van Beethoven (2000)

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN (2000)

1) Broadcasting Live From The MCI; 2) L'Aguardiente; 3) Tom Flower's 1500 Valves; 4) All Her Favorite Fruit (orchestral version); 5) Closing Theme; 6) Loose Lips Sink Ships; 7) Who Are The Brain Police?; 8) Stayin' At Home With The Girls In The Morning; 9) Klondike; 10) S.P. 37957 Medley; 11) Balalaika Gap (demo); 12) The Perfect Enigma Machine; 13) We're All Wasted And We're Wasting All Your Time.

Leave it to Camper Van Beethoven to make an ideal mess out of a comeback-reunion album. After a decade of independent projects, such as Lowery's Cracker, Lowery, Krummenacher, and Segel come together to see if there's still any future left for the good old Camper — the proper test being the ability to produce a record of unpredictable, but controlled chaos and see if it holds water. (Spoiler: if it does hold water, it's probably not worth a damn. Who needs a Camper Van Beethoven that holds water, rather than spills it all on your pants?).

Many of the song titles here are recognizable from past records: in fact, upon first glance one might actually take this for a live album, but only a few tracks seem to come from actual live performances, with the others being an eclectic mix of old demo versions, outtakes, and some newly recorded material, all purportedly tangled together with the aim of not letting you properly distinguish between «vintage» CvB and «modern» CvB. Accordingly, I'm not even going to try to sort this out or focus on minor details, such as, for instance, ʽBalalaika Gapʼ being almost the same track as the original, only a little bit slower, or ʽWasting All Your Timeʼ being exactly the same track as it used to be on the Take The Skinheads Bowling EP, for some reason.

Of the new, or, at least, previously unheard material, some relative highlights are: (a) ʽS.P. 37957 Medleyʼ — a six-minute mash-up of Led Zeppelin's ʽDazed And Confusedʼ with ʽHava Nagilaʼ, because, I mean, what two songs in the world could be spiritually closer to each other?; (b) ʽL'Aguardienteʼ, a cool acoustic-and-violin instrumental (featuring Morgan Fichter and actually played live) that, technically, is also a mash-up, with Iberian flamenco motives seamlessly flowing into Balkan dance music and vice versa; (c) ʽKlondikeʼ, a long, morose, dreary country waltz with quite a bit of a Leonard Cohen vibe to it.

Curiously, all of these excellent tracks are quite lengthy, whereas shorter tracks tend to float by as relatively unnoticed, or relatively unimpressive — thus, there's really no point in Camper Van Beethoven covering Zappa's ʽWho Are The Brain Police?ʼ, an originally mega-weird track that could not be made any weirder by anybody; and brief instrumentals such as ʽClosing Themeʼ, an exercise «progressive blues-rock», are simply boring, because nobody in the band could play the guitar at the level of «guitar hero» anyway (incidentally, the song was at one time available under the tongue-in-cheek title of ʽGuitar Heroʼ). They still get by on the strength of diversity — almost every single track is in a genre of its own — so, ultimately, it's still fun, and the orchestrated version of ʽAll Her Favorite Fruitʼ even adds a bit of a baroque-pop flavor which, so far, has not been noticed on any CvB record at all.

Like Vantiquities, this is primarily a record for completists, but its release at the turn of the cen­tury may have been somewhat symbolic — a reminder that there will always be a place for a bit of post-modern surrealism in the new millennium as well, even as, with all these covers of Zappa and Led Zeppelin, it is obvious that Lowery & Co.'s primary influences are still firmly rooted in the past: be it a resurrection of old recordings or work on the new ones, there is no attempt to recognize any of the «progress» that the musical world went through in the Nineties, and you certainly won't find me complaining about this.

Camper Van Beethoven: Camper Vantiquities

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: CAMPER VANTIQUITIES (1993)

1) Heart; 2) Never Go Back; 3) Seven Languages; 4) Axe Murderer Song; 5) SP37957; 6) Crossing Over; 7) Guar­dian Angels; 8) I'm Not Like Everybody Else; 9) A. C. Cover; 10) Porpoise Mouth; 11) We Workers Do Not Under­stand Modern Art; 12) We Eat Your Children; 13) Six More Miles To The Graveyard; 14) Ice Cream Everyday; 15) Processional; 16) Photograph / Om Eye.

Naturally, with the band no longer existing, what a better time to start digging in the vaults? From the loving hands of bassist Victor Krummenacher comes this odds-and-ends package that inclu­ded, in its entirety, the EP Vampire Can Mating Oven, originally released in 1987, along with ten previously unreleased tracks from various sessions. Considering that the EP is also available today on the expanded CD issue of the self-titled third album, and that the non-EP odds-and-ends do not add any startling surprises to what we already know about the Campers, this is not a very essential release, but still a nice one.

Actually, Mating Oven was a damn fine EP that is well worth having in any configuration. It has some of the band's catchiest tunes — Lowery's ʽHeartʼ is a very ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ-esque piece of guitar-based ska-pop, with an almost unnoticeable tongue-in-cheek attitude; ʽNever Go Backʼ is also ska-pop, but this time with a swampy slide guitar lead and a folksier vocal melody, ironically admonishing us all to "never go back" (nice to hear from a band that always went back... then again, to be fair, it's more like they were all walking forwards while looking back­wards); ʽIce Cream Everydayʼ is one of their few stabs at synth-pop, with cold electronic patterns matching the "ice cream" lyrics — not great, but amusing; and leave it to Camper Van Beethoven to resort to «oblique strategies» and pull a Ringo Starr cover out of their sleeve — ʽPhotographʼ remains as cool as the day Ringo and George put the final touches on it, though there's hardly anything of importance that the band adds to it here (unless you are so seriously biased against Ringo as a singer and as an artist that you only agree to listen to his good stuff when it's being done by somebody else — in which case, shame on you).

The one true masterpiece on the EP, however, is ʽSeven Languagesʼ, one of Camper's most blissfully arranged tracks — funky, with a threatening, serpentine, «poisonous» wah-wah lead line driving the song, light-Gothic keyboards, and lyrics that could, for once, relate to most of us as we bumble through life without really managing to do anything worthwhile. If only there were some space left for hooks in the vocal melody, it could be a great classic of the decade — as it is, it does not quite amount to, say, the level of mopey Cure classics, but it comes fairly close.

As for the rest of the tracks, it's mostly generic CvB rootsy stuff — sometimes with really cool titles like ʽWe Workers Do Not Understand Modern Artʼ (seems like an early version of or a vari­ation on the ʽMao Reminiscesʼ instrumental, actually), sometimes with really incongruent titles (ʽWe Eat Your Childrenʼ is a bit of Mexican folk, with prominent acoustic lead parts — unless we're talking real tender, playful, soothing cannibalism here), and sometimes with shocking lyrics (ʽAxe Murderer Songʼ is like Lennon's ʽWorking Class Heroʼ, only with a completely new set of existentialist questions such as "why do axe murderers only attack when we're making love?"). Hiding somewhere in the middle is another randomly gratuitous cover of a classic — this time it's ʽI'm Not Like Everybody Elseʼ by The Kinks, a song that could certainly serve as a household anthem for Lowery and Co., but hardly one which they could sing in a more defiant and aggres­sive manner than Dave Davies.

So, overall, this is essential for completists, and a few of the tracks from Mating Ovens are essential for best-of compilations; the stylistic world of Camper Van Beethoven is so large and diverse that even here you can still discover some sorely missing pieces of the whole puzzle. But, of course, odds-and-ends will always be odds-and-ends.

Camper Van Beethoven: Key Lime Pie

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: KEY LIME PIE (1989)

1) Opening Theme; 2) Jack Ruby; 3) Sweethearts; 4) When I Win The Lottery; 5) (I Was Born In A) Laundromat; 6) Borderline; 7) The Light From A Cake; 8) June; 9) All Her Favorite Fruit; 10) Interlude; 11) Flowers; 12) The Humid Press Of Days; 13) Pictures Of Matchstick Men; 14) Come On Darkness.

With this album, the first stage of the existence of Camper Van Beethoven comes to a — rather somber — close. Apparently, the group began to splinter even before the recording started, with the loss of Jonathan Segel being a particularly heavy blow: they do their best to mask his absence by hiring non-member Don Lax and, later still, temporary member Morgan Fichter to play the violin, but it is, perhaps, not so much the presence/absence of the fiddle sound as it is a certain intuitively felt disappearance of one shade of rainbow that is the main problem.

Every review of Key Lime Pie that you read is going to focus on two aspects of this record: (a) it is noticeably darker and less idealistic than before (as if you couldn't tell, what with the very last track being named ʽCome On Darknessʼ and all); (b) it is less musically diverse, with most songs molded in a relatively traditional Americana pattern, with heavy folk, country, and blues influen­ces. Throw in a bunch of politicized lyrics every now and then, and you'd easily get the impres­sion that Lowery and his pals are trying to get «serious» and «make a statement», essentially betraying Camper's original un-ideology, either in the vain hope to score extra financial success (which they actually did, since Key Lime Pie sold noticeably better than they used to), or be­cause they have outgrown their adolescent phase and are no longer so obstinate about making «art for art's sake».

Certainly this impression is at its strongest with the album's first song, ʽJack Rubyʼ, which uses the title character as an abstract allegory for the mess we're in ("now we think it's a virtue to simply survive / but it feels like this calm it's decaying / it's collapsing under its own weight"). It's a long, repetitive, gloomy folk-rock ballad, one that probably begs to be covered by a Joan Baez or, who knows, even a Bob Dylan (certainly wouldn't feel out of place on one of his late period albums like Modern Times). With a sparse arrangement, largely reduced to a ringing rhythm guitar and an angry distorted lead guitar track with a penchant for sustained notes and whammy bar abuse, this is as close to an apocalyptic mood as the Campers ever get.

Skip ahead several tracks, though, and songs like ʽJuneʼ will show you that essentially, it's just David Lowery in a really, really bad mood. "Are you weary of the lengthening days?", he asks, "do you secretly wish for November's rain?", and goes on to conclude, "there is nothing in this world more bitter than Spring". Musically, this is probably the album's most interesting and innovative number, a dark waltz that shifts keys and becomes even darker midway through, all the time staying very heavy on the strings, with a psychedelic chamber arrangement somewhere in between country-western and modern classical — but its words and its basic mood suggest, first and foremost, that something just went really rotten on the inside. It's like the band just doesn't feel like having fun any more — not some sort of conscious decision to «get deeper and darker», but merely an instinctive reflection of some nasty virus eating up the soul.

The only track on the album that is not altogether infused with this nasty feel is (in yet another nod to the great god of unpredictability) the band's cover of Status Quo's ʽPictures Of Matchstick Menʼ, with the slide guitar riff lovingly recreated by Morgan Fichter's violin, but otherwise fairly loyal to the original. However, in its lonely position, stuck in between a bunch of morose tracks, it sounds more like a melancholically nostalgic tribute to long gone days of hippie happiness than an idealistic attempt to bring those days back. And how could it be taken with a light heart, really, after all these songs that deal with pissed-off loser dreams (ʽWhen I Win The Lotteryʼ — "when the end comes to this old world / the rats will cry and the rest will curl up"), venting frustration accumulated at the bottom of the social ladder (ʽI Was Born In A Laundromatʼ), the impossibility of getting satisfaction even from blessed escapism (ʽBorderlineʼ — ska rhythms return with a gritty, snappy vengeance and conclude that "on the borderline everything is empty, even you and I"), and the uselessness of romance (ʽAll Her Favorite Fruitʼ, said to be based around a love line from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but applicable to any situation in which a pair of lovers feel like "we are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof")?

All in all, this was clearly not a happy period in the band's life, but the album on the whole still qualifies as a good one — there's plenty of catchy choruses, enough tracks like ʽJuneʼ that can still grab your attention with unusual and beautiful textures, and Lowery is as good at transmit­ting the aura of weariness and dissatisfaction as he is at being a smartass cynic with a sharp sense of humor. Not every band that started out with such effective absurdity as ʽThe Day That Lassie Went To The Moonʼ could bring it to such a convincingly morose finale as ʽCome On Darknessʼ, even if it does make you wonder if there's a certain natural law that inevitably leads The Joker on to becoming The Undertaker (then again, so far it hasn't really worked on Weird Al Yankovic, to say the least). I give it a thumbs up, but beware — you will only enjoy it if you did not dig all those previous Camper records merely for being «hilarious».

Camper Van Beethoven: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART (1988)

1) Eye Of Fatima (pt. 1); 2) Eye Of Fatima (pt. 2); 3) O Death; 4) She Divines Water; 5) Devil Song; 6) One Of These Days; 7) Turquoise Jewelry; 8) Waka; 9) Change Your Mind; 10) My Path Belated; 11) Never Go Back; 12) The Fool; 13) Tania; 14) Life Is Grand.

Always, always comes that day when the miserable reviewer, hungry for words, subjects and hooks, finally gets the chance to write: «Major changes on band so-and-so's most recent album! Finally, they have been able to secure a major label contract and professional recording quality, and so...» ...then you allow yourself a few seconds to take the decision whether it made them great or it made them suck (usually the latter), and from then on it's a fairly smooth ride.

The problem is, I did not even notice anything that would suggest Camper Van Beethoven had such a bout of fortune. And it's not like I couldn't have noticed — on second listen, you do notice a much louder drum sound than before, and a denser, yet cleaner mix than before, courtesy of pro­ducer Dennis Herring, assigned to them by Virgin Records. And it's not as if I haven't noticed some stylistic changes, either, as the band takes on a slightly more serious face than before, and comes up with a much larger number of «normal» songs than before. But never for the life of me would I want to ascribe that change to a commercial urge — Lowery and friends normally act as if the division between «commercial» and «non-commercial» never existed for them in the first place. It's not as if they began largely playing free-form jazz and then slowly migrated to pop formats; there was nothing self-consciously «weird» about their music, other than a never-ending drive to freely translate stuff from one musical idiom into another.

And so, on this first album for Virgin, the band simply gives us more of the same, except that the selected musical forms are now almost completely restricted to whatever was en vogue a good fifteen years ago — retro pop-rock, retro folk-rock, retro prog-rock, with a bit of glam and proto-punk thrown in for good measure. All too often, Lowery's guitar and Segel's violin combine to give things a definite country-and-western slant, but whenever that happens, psychedelic effects and melodic overdubs, as well as surrealist lyrics, are added to make sure that the band properly sounds like "cowboys on acid" (ʽEye Of Fatimaʼ), combining hillbilly paraphernalia with a hippie attitude: I'm sure somewhere out there, off some lonesome cloud, Hank Williams is surreptitious­ly eyeing them with fondness in his heart.

A few songs would suggest that the band is taking a darker turn — early on, their slow country dance take on the traditional ʽO Deathʼ sounds both ironically irreverent and a bit creepy, because you never can tell with these guys if they are doing a parody or a parallel-universe reinvention; and the fact that they took this old Appalachian dark folk number and turned it into a catchy folk-pop tune somehow makes it creepier. But there is no generally underlying dark current to the al­bum — in fact, the final song explicitly states that "and life is grand... and I will say this at the risk of falling from favor / With those of you who have appointed yourselves / To expect us to say something darker". Behind all of these gestures really lies the same old — a stark desire to never be pigeonholed: considering that «college rock» or «underground rock» is typically associ­ated with a punkish or at least just a generally mopey attitude towards life, Lowery and Co. feel like they have to present themselves as optimists, even if ʽO Deathʼ might seem to suggest the opposite. Why they never went out with a passionate cover of ABBA's ʽDancing Queenʼ, though, I have no idea.

That's all fine, though; more questionable is their decision to include some instrumentals where the emphasis is not on genre-mashing as it used to be, but rather on pure atmospherics — the second part of ʽEye Of Fatimaʼ is not unlike some pseudo-Led Zeppelin folk-metal experiment, with a mix of acoustic picking and blazing electric guitar god soloing, and later on they pretty much repeat the same thing with ʽWakaʼ; still later, ʽThe Foolʼ is a psycho-metallic waltz that you could probably hear from the likes of Jeff Beck in one of his particularly eccentric periods. It's okay, but Greg Lisher, responsible for lead guitar, is hardly a great guitar virtuoso, and if I am not all that tempted to play air guitar on these songs, then I am not sure what they really are there for — I'd rather go back to my Led Zep and Fairport Convention records.

Less questionable is the decision to just write some nice, fun songs — ʽNever Go Backʼ, ʽOne Of These Daysʼ, ʽChange Your Mindʼ, and the somewhat mysterious ʽTaniaʼ (whose messy lyrics seem loaded with the Jean-Luc Godard spirit) are all friendly, catchy and just sound cool on those front porches where Garth Brooks would not fit in. There's nothing too deep or pretentious con­cealed in them — merely an attempt to create conventional, but not boring roots-rock that could be palatable to the highly demanding listener. I'm really not sure how to follow this with an in­appropriately deep-sounding conclusion, so I'll just leave you with another thumbs up, though perhaps a less excited one than on the band's debut, where it did look like they wanted to subvert conventional musical rules — here, all they want to do is to follow them creatively.

Camper Van Beethoven: Camper Van Beethoven

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN (1986)

1) Good Guys & Bad Guys; 2) Joe Stalin's Cadillac; 3) Five Sticks; 4) Lulu Land; 5) Une Fois; 6) We Saw Jerry's Daughter; 7) Surprise Truck; 8) Stairway To Heavan (Sic); 9) The History Of Utah; 10) Still Wishing To Course; 11) We Love You; 12) Hoe Yourself Down; 13) Peace & Love; 14) Folly; 15) Interstellar Overdrive; 16) Shut Us Down.

On their third album, Camper Van Beethoven continue to «normalize» their sound, in this parti­cular case, «normalization» being the equivalent of showing how much they love rock music from the late Sixties and early Seventies (and hey, who doesn't? Oh, okay, today some people don't, but what else could those intelligent college-rock kids from the Eighties choose as the main source of inspiration? Barry White?). More often than not, the inspiration is indirect: for instance, they take Led Zep-based song titles (ʽFive Sticksʼ, ʽStairway To Heavanʼ) and use them for psy­chedelic freakouts — the former is ʽThe Ambiguity Songʼ backwards, the latter is ʽChairman Maoʼ backwards (and somehow not completely losing its original charm in the process). Or, for instance, they express their reverence for the Grateful Dead by poking gentle fun at Deadheads (ʽWe Saw Jerry's Daughterʼ, which, incidentally, is also one of the album's fastest and catchiest pop numbers — although it doesn't sound much like a Grateful Dead song at all).

But just so you know that you can never properly predict the Campers' next move, they go out on a limb and introduce a faithful, as-note-for-note-as-possible rendition of Pink Floyd's ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ — somewhat stripped down compared to the original, but still with tremendous atten­tion to detail. Needless to say, a cover like that really only works in the context of the album: it adds nothing to the classic ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ experience, but it matters all the world to us that it is done here by the same guys who, in their regular hours, produce sarcastic deconstruc­tions of all the musical genres in the world.

There is also more emphasis on the lyrical message and the surrealist stories behind the music, fortunately, not at the expense of musical ideas. ʽGood Guys & Bad Guysʼ and ʽJoe Stalin's Cadillacʼ start things off with some political flavor — the former addresses the Russian issue from the point of view of an easy-going redneck (or college dropout, whatever) lazily basking in the sun, and the latter somehow jabs and stabs at all the dictatorial powers in the world, though I am still not exactly sure how; I guess that "Well my cadillac is Johnson's cadillac, is Stalin's cadillac, is Somoza's cadillac..." implies that dictators only become dictators because we allow them to, but then again, maybe it does not imply anything at all, and the whole thing is just an excuse for some reckless boogie fun. (And again, there's a completely ad hoc Led Zeppelin refe­rence at the end of the song — purely by association, led on by the word "bridge" in the line "gonna drive my cadillac off a bridge". What do you think when you hear the word "bridge"? You must not be a true Led Zep fan if you think something different).

On a slighter note, ʽThe History Of Utahʼ tackles you-know-what, presenting a very alternative history of the estab­lishment of the Church of Latter-day Saints to the sound of a droning psycho-boogie with a pen­chant for abrupt tempo changes; and ʽWe Love Youʼ is a variation on ʽThe Devil Went Down To Georgiaʼ, with a notable change in the theme (the Devil becomes a member of the band rather than taking the souls of its members). Still, both songs do reflect certain prob­lems that the band members seem to have with religious practices — and their irreverence ex­tends even to the very psychedelia that seems to fuel this record (ʽLulu Landʼ, a parody on the mind-opening, transcendental nature of flower power era psychedelic anthems).

On the whole, though, as fun as the record is on a first-come, first-serve basis, the remaining impression is, well, not quite as impressive as before. Too many of the songs just sound like jokes, made tastier through the factor of unpredictability — but jokes all the same. As far as actual songs are concerned, ʽGood Guys & Bad Guysʼ is arguably the only number here that qualifies: everything else is either a parody, or a brief freakout, or a passable, but straightforward genre experiment (ʽHoe Yourself Downʼ sure sounds good, but its meaning here is only gained in the context of other songs — normally, if you want this type of fast country dance by itself, you go to Nashville, don't you?), or, well, ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ. Still a thumbs up, of course, but I find myself pining for all those ska instrumentals.

Camper Van Beethoven: II & III

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: II & III (1986)

1) Abundance; 2) Cowboys From Hollywood; 3) Sad Lovers' Waltz; 4) Turtlehead; 5) I Love Her All The Time; 6) No Flies On Us; 7) Down And Out; 8) No Krugerrands For David; 9) (Don't You Go To) Goleta; 10) 4 Year Plan; 11) (We're A) Bad Trip; 12) Circles; 13) Dustpan; 14) Sometimes; 15) Chain Of Circumstance; 16) ZZ Top Goes To Egypt; 17) Cattle (Reversed); 18) Form Another Stone; 19) No More Bullshit.

The title of this album is first and foremost intended to look cool, but also reflects some objective truth, considering that about half of it was recorded while drummer Anthony Guess was still in the band (and new guitarist Greg Lisher had just joined), and the other half was made after the drummer's departure, with Molla and Lowery splitting the drum work between themselves (per­manent replacement Chris Pedersen only arrived in time to record one track, the rough garage-rocker ʽ(We're A) Bad Tripʼ).

In all honesty, though, Camper Van Beethoven is more about the collective spirit than individual personalities, and we are not going to be seriously tracing all the complicated comings and goings here — the only thing that matters is whether they affect that spirit or not, and II & III, by all accounts, remains unaffected. Not that it sounds like a copy of the debut: on the contrary, there are some serious changes made, as the band largely abandons the «remake everything as a ska groove» principle, and branches out into additional directions; anything goes, as long as it's got good rhythm and as long as you can put a slightly weird spin on it.

The only problem is that this time around, there's no seeming conceptual unity to the recordings at all — all you can do is fondly enjoy its light-hearted attitude and fish out occasional moments of musical brilliance. Two songs only go for some sort of social message, one of them doing so brilliantly (the abovementioned ʽBad Tripʼ, a sneering putdown of those who "live such bright and flashing lives" with top-notch energy and a classic neo-garage riff) and the other not so bril­liantly (ʽNo More Bullshitʼ — a last-minute outburst of sloganeering is not going to save the day, even if you happen to agree with the song's sentiments such as "no more MTV, no more rock stars... Elvis Presley died and no one knows why!"; musically, the song sounds like somebody took a sonic experiment off Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and normalized it — well, okay, but it does not agree so perfectly with the verbal message). The rest is a smorgasbord of pop, folk, country, psychedelia, punk, and yes, just a little bit of ska... actually, more of a Slavo­nic dance, as corroborated by its prominent «mandolaika» lead part and the telling title ʽ4 Year Planʼ (I guess 5-year plans were too much to handle for a band with this much impatience).

Again, though, the most musically brilliant pieces are those instrumentals on which Segel's violin gets top billing — ʽNo Krugerrands For Davidʼ is a mad send-up of Jewish dance music, but my personal favorite is ʽZZ Top Goes To Egyptʼ, where near-Eastern violin lines are psychedelically spiced up with echo effects and placed on top of a bluesy vamp that, honestly, does not sound much like ZZ Top, but then I'm not really sure who the hell it sounds like, so might as well be ZZ Top. Other instrumentals are not nearly as interesting; for instance, ʽDustpanʼ is sort of what you'd expect a basic punk-rock song to sound like if the chainsaw buzz was replaced with bursts of acoustic jangle — an idea that seems intriguing in theory, but turns out boring in practice. How­ever, check out the excellent ʽTurtleheadʼ: seventy-five seconds of a crazyass country-punk-noise hybrid with unexpected time, tone, and mood shifts around every corner, a track that even ends up having a distinctly King Crimson-ian feel to it while it lasts.

Of the remaining vocal numbers, Sonic Youth's ʽI Love Her All The Timeʼ, remade as a rollickin' bluegrass number, deserves some attention for the novelty factor; ʽChain Of Circumstanceʼ is an attempt at twee-pop, ruined by bad vocals; and ʽForm Another Stoneʼ might be an overlooked psychedelic masterpiece from these guys — parodic as it is, the violin parts, laced with echo and phasing effects, wind themselves around the guitar jangle in a decidedly mind-blowing fashion. But even so, brilliance and senselessness go hand in hand on the album: for every winner, there's a relative loser, and overall, a bit of quality control probably wouldn't hurt. I appreciate, for in­stance, that the violin on ʽSad Lovers' Waltzʼ occasionally ends up reproducing the violin lines on the Beatles' ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ, but the song as a whole does nothing for me, either as a sincere country number or as parody, whatever.

In short, II & III might as well be subtitled The Brilliant & The Pointless, a record that, far more so than the debut, highlights the band's virtues and flaws. Listening to this, you get the feeling that they could have easily done a great «serious» album in some sort of country-punk style — but chose the humble-pretentious path of self-deflation and reckless branching out with no particular place to go instead. If they were the Beatles and this was their White Album, they might get away with it, but I'll still take ʽWild Honey Pieʼ over ʽDustpanʼ, because the art of painting evocative musical pictures with musical trifles is a dang hard art to do well, and Camper Van Beethoven do it well... well, about 45% of the time. Which is still darn impressive for a mid-Eighties Californian band, so an honest thumbs up it is anyway.

Camper Van Beethoven: Telephone Free Landslide Victory

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN: TELEPHONE FREE LANDSLIDE VICTORY (1985)

1) The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon; 2) Border Ska; 3) Wasted; 4) Yanqui Go Home; 5) Oh No!; 6) Nine Of Disks; 7) Payed Vacation: Greece; 8) Where The Hell Is Bill?; 9*) Wasting All Your Time; 10*) Epigram #5; 11*) At Kuda; 12*) Epigram #2; 13*) Cowboys From Hollywood; 14*) Colonel Enrique Adolfo Bermudez; 15) Vladivostock; 16) Skinhead Stomp; 17) Tina; 18) Take The Skinheads Bowling; 19) Mao Reminisces About His Days In Southern China; 20) I Don't See You; 21) Balalaika Gap; 23) Opi Rides Again; 24) Club Med Sucks; 25) Ambiguity Song.

Those unfortunate (or fortunate) souls whose youth was not spent in Eighties' America would pro­bably, in retrospect, think of «college rock» as represented by either leftist hardcore bands or leftist folk-rock bands (of the more subtle variety, like R.E.M., or of the more straightforward one, like 10,000 Maniacs). As one begins digging a little deeper, though, all sorts of oddities begin to come out — including acts that are fairly hard to categorize, since one of their intentions was to avoid becoming easily pigeonholed, at all costs. And among such acts, few can boast a higher level of oddball-ness than the oddball-some-titled Camper Van Beethoven (originally — Camper Van Beethoven and The Border Patrol), founded by a bunch of eccentric Californians with guitar player and singer David Lowery at the core center.

Unlike the abrasive, avantgarde-influenced young noisemakers dominating the underground, Camper Van Beethoven did not seem to care much about pushing forward musical boundaries (being largely content with however wide they'd already been pushed) or about making their music as basically «inaccessible» and «unlistenable» as possible. With minimal exceptions (only a tiny handful of these tracks experiment with dissonance, e. g. ʽNine Of Disksʼ), all the music on this album is well within certain established traditions — Camper Van Beethoven like various forms of pop, punk, punk-pop, pop-punk, and country-western, though their major love spot is reserved for the venerable musical form of ska (or polka, if you'd rather like an Eastern rather than Western hemisphere analogy, although Campers don't exactly huddle the accordeon).

The ska-based tracks on the band's debut largely seem to function as instrumental interludes — but do not make the mistake of writing them off as insignificant, because if there's anything truly exciting and original about Camper's musical agenda, most of it is concealed in these instrumen­tals. With two guitarists and a talented multi-instrumentalist (Jonathan Segel on violin, mandolin, and various keyboards) involved, they present humorous and inventive twists on just about every musical genre that ends up on the roulette wheel. Beginning fairly innocently with some pop elec­tric guitar on ʽBorder Skaʼ; they follow it up with a country twist on ʽYanqui Go Homeʼ; go Near Eastern on ʽAt Kudaʼ; zip into Mexico for ʽColonel Enrique Adolfo Bermudezʼ (there are some spoken vocals on that one, but it falls in the same ska-based category); try to summon a Russian vibe — in my opinion, somewhat unsuccessfully — on ʽVladivostockʼ; later try to do it again, with slightly more satisfactory results, on ʽBalalaika Gapʼ (that's a mandolin, though, hardly an authentic balalaika); and reach an absolute climactic peak on ʽMao Reminisces About His Days In Southern Chinaʼ — a less smart band would probably just slap a title like this onto any random piece of improvised shit, but the Campers actually make an effort to play a doubled guitar/violin melody that is reminiscent of a Chinese folk melody. It's catchy, it's funny, and, strangest of all, it is actually touching in some way — I'm still trying to figure out why, though.

It would be very easy to just write off this «jamaicaization» of various music genres as a cheap gimmick, and I cannot, in fact, exclude that, given the band's general penchant for satire and irony, all of this was essentially performed as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the «world music» scene that was shaping up in the mid-Eighties. But there's too much thought and genuine feeling behind it all to reduce all the spectrum to just humor and parody — you might as well say that the band breathes new life in these clichéd old genres by grafting them onto an ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ kind of stock. And although there is not a lot of complexity involved, the performances are sur­prisingly diligent and well-rehearsed: these guys took the DIY ethics seriously — if you really have to do it yourself, you might as well do it fuckin' good.

In between all the instrumental fun, you have the actual songs — also with a fairly wide range, though not nearly as all-encompassing as the ska bits. As could be expected, most of these are written in an absurdist paradigm, but not a particularly nonsensical or dadaist one: this is an Ame­rican band, and the situations they invent are more Saturday Night Live than Monty Python, be it Lassie's self-sacrificing journey to outer space (ʽThe Day That Lassie Went To The Moonʼ), the brainless spasms of youth rebellion (ʽClub Med Sucksʼ), or lazy indignation at the absence of a band member for the rehearsals (ʽWhere The Hell Is Bill?ʼ, referring to the original drummer Bill McDonald, who actually left way before these sessions even started — "maybe he went to see The Circle Jerks!"). Musically, they sound strangely more rugged and amateurish than the ska pieces — almost as if this were a completely different band playing at times — but no less odd, particularly when they cover Black Flag's fifty-second hardcore classic ʽWastedʼ as a slow roots-rock number with a prominent fiddle part; and the best of these tunes also happen to be insanely catchy and even uplifting — ʽTake The Skinheads Bowlingʼ is rightfully considered a classic not because it deals with skinheads, but because it is a terrific piece of jangle-pop, and once again, Segel's violin work is highly commendable.

Things are neatly tied together with the closing number, ʽAmbiguity Songʼ, something that would not sound out of place at your local hoedown, but whose main point is to deliver, in condensed form, the main message of the entire album: "Everything seems to be up in the air at this time / One day soon, it'll all settle down / But everything seems to be up in the air at this time" — deli­vered in an ever so slightly worried, but ultimately calm and ironic fashion. All the more ironic, that is, considering how it was all baked way back in 1985, yet still seems so relevant at the end of the distantly futuristic 2016: the album sounds every bit as charming now as it did back then, and I am absurdly happy to render a well-deserved thumbs up verdict.

(Technical note: the 24-track CD issue of the album is actually much longer than the original due to the insertion in its middle of the entire contents of the contemporary EP Take The Skinheads Bowling, including an early version of the classic ʽCowboys From Hollywoodʼ. Another tech­nical note is that the album itself was supposed to be named Telephone Tree Landslide Victory, but apparently the label guys messed up and got Free instead of Tree — which, in my as well as the band's opinion, actually improves on the original proposition.)