RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE! Now that I've got your attention...rape! Hahaha! Now that I've REALLY got your attention, rape is not funny. But Nomeansno is a band named after rape, so that certainly got MY attention. Hold on, let's start over...
Nomeansno is a serious musical band with serious musical ambitions, and they're named after rape which isn't funny. The band is Canadian though, which is funny! It started out as just two brothers, Rob Wright and John Wright: the Wright Brothers! Rob and John didn't invent the airplane, oh no sir, but they did basically pioneer a very specific style of punk rock that I may or may not talk about eventually. That part's not important right now! What's important are the peculiar beginnings: Rob played bass and John played drums and that was it. That was the band. No guitars. What is this, Lightning Bolt? What is this, Morphine? What is this, a third thing? Ben Folds Five? I dunno.
Anyway, reading about the early Nomeansno days it was certainly clear that the brothers saw the guitar as a crutch that they wanted to avoid. This obviously didn't last, but their self-released debut Mama is about as bare-bones as you're going to get from them with respect to both instrumentation and production. Bass and percussion, vocals, and an occasional guitar or keyboard overdub, it very much replicated the live sound from their early gigging days as a dynamic duo! Of course, this live sound replication has its pros and cons. One can't help but feel that the album suffers a bit from its thin sound. But more on that later.
FOR THE DEFENSE, having no lead guitar means having to make up for it with more interesting bass and drums, correct? Yes! Rob and John are very accomplished players of their respective instruments. Rob treats the bass guitar like it's SUPPOSED TO BE played lead, just like my other favorite domineering bassist Les Claypool, and (just like Claypool) he has a virtuositic fast-fretting technique to keep those bass notes a-movin'. John holds his drumsticks like a dang ol' military man and can rattle through complicated, head-spinning syncopated rhythms with robotic accuracy. Both brothers take their cues from jazz greats such as bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Art Blakey, and, as such, incorporate into their sound a whole hell of a lot of jazzy rhythms and textures. Being a punk band first and foremost, this approach leads to some seriously original and satisfying results. No one should be talking about "progressive punk" without name-dropping Nomeansno since they pretty much created the whole idea of "progressive punk" and everything, never mind the fact that the term is one of the largest oxymorons in music. I guess I did end up talking about all this after all! Nomeansno basically pioneered "math punk". And fuck them forever for it.
FOR THE ANTI-DEFENSE, and I'm going to jump right into talking about Mama here, if punk was the whole point then this record, in that respect, fails. That's probably a little harsh, but honestly, the essence of punk comes from fast, hard-edged aggression. It comes from a complete subversion of rock music's excesses. It comes from being a big fat Fuck You to society. Here's the old saying: "Punk is what you play until you learn to play the guitar". So these guys are great at playing their instruments and they're incorporating artsy riffs and nuanced drum fills and interesting progressions and off-the-wall vocal deliveries, that sounds like wimpy art school "punk" to me. That's Talking Heads and Television and The Clash and shit. That's what this record is to me, it's a weak art school punk record. It's mostly cerebral and unassuming, and the parts that AREN'T cerebral and unassuming (the stuff that is actually punky) is undercut by the thin production and the scrawny bass n' drums instrumentation, so it's hard to take seriously. Basically, compared to their later stuff, there's not nearly enough ass-kicking going on throughout Mama. A lot of the ideas are good, in fact a lot of them are REALLY good; the potential is there, but the execution is underwhelming. And when it comes to both punk and art punk alike, the execution is everything.
A good example of everything I'm talking about so far is the track "Red Devil". It's not even a punk song in the first place, the intro is a very Black Sabbath-y mood-setting eerie drone that leads into a repeating tribal bass/drum cadence. On top of that, Rob's goofy voice sets the tone further with his creepy spoken-word lyrics ("Red Devil bites your neck/Your tongue's stick out, your cock's erect"). As the song progresses, his voice becomes more desperate bouncing between high-pitched Satanic prayers and ghoulish, gutteral mutterings. Punctuated throughout are superimposed background yelps and shrieks. It has all the trappings of a great creep-o fuckin' early industrial or noise rock song, kind of like a less mechanized version of Swans or Suicide, but...I don't know, the components don't add up nicely. The creepiness is cheesy and there's not enough MONSTER FUCKING RIFFAGE to elevate it. The production sounds like Rob's snarling through the verses in his childhood bedroom. Any profound effect that the song attempts is ruined by the amateurish execution. And lot of the album feels this way. And it's a shame.
So what's good? With Mama it's more enjoyable if you revel more in the technical effort and less in the presentation. "Living is Free", the album opener, displays a lot of the type of technical effort to look forward to: complicated bass arpeggio workouts, crisp and clean drumming, pretty keyboard overdubs, and singing and songwriting that's brimming with personality. However, the actual chorus is an awkward speed bump; suddenly the song shifts on dime and Rob's electronically warped, barely-intelligible voice declares, with barely much of enthusiasm that immediately preceded it, "Living is free/Free and at ease/Living is free/Free and at ease...". Bah! Stuff like "My Roommate is Turning into a Monster" and "Mama's Little Boy" are similar slow-build jazz numbers, with groovy, sinister and snakey bass lines and more cool, unsettling vocals. However, both songs meander, they chug along endlessly on one or two chords, there's too much tension without much release. Especially "Mama's Little Boy", at nearly six minutes, doesn't deserve to go on this way for that long.
But the good stuff among it all is really good, honest! Like "Rich Guns", full of hooky stops and starts and punky, politically-charged lyrics! Or "We Are the Chopped", which has a neat, desperate atmosphere to it that actually works in this case to pair up with the minimalist emptiness (like with the echoed "We are the chopped - the chopped!" lines). I even like "Living in Détente", which has no pretense whatsoever of a punk song. It's a piano-driven lounge jazz number! And it works will as a surprise, straightly-played pleasant proper album closer, still sinister in the lyrics but barely betrayed by the music. These guys are smart and, thankfully, it already shows this early on.
Tacked onto the end of the 1992 CD reissue are the four tracks from their 1981 Betrayal, Fear, Anger, Hatred EP. Noticeable here is the guitar on the forefront, especially with hard-rockin' "Try Not To Stutter" and "I'm All Wet". "Approaching Zero" sounds like the precursor to "Living in Détente": lead piano, bubbly lounge jazz, depressing lyrics! "Forget Your Life" is gothy and drone-y and even lower-fi than the lowest-fi parts of the album proper. They did this song better later. If you didn't know that these last four tracks were part of an earlier EP you wouldn't even really tell the difference, the band's growth isn't stark enough yet.
The end product is an atypical offering in the Nomeansno canon. Look to literally everything that they released after Mama for a better experience. Adding Andy Kerr on guitar added a much-needed layer of sound that--good for the Wright brothers for trying something different--ended up making the band way more interesting. Rob's voice gets deeper as time goes on too, which helps tremendously to add texture to his already-charismatic singing. All the talent was already there, it just needed a little more time to thrive. This was my first Nomeansno record, and it didn't scare me away, so all these years later I'd still recommend it to anybody who likes, you know, wimpy-ass art punk. Just listen to some of the other albums first.
JUST OK
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