Tom Pynchon has recently been
discovered through Internet tracking of his credit cards to be living in an affluent
middle-class neighbourhood of New York City, married to his literary agent. His latest
work, Mason & Dixon, was released to great fanfare, but word is he will not be
going "on tour" like the bands he has inspired! He has, however, written liner
notes for an album called Nobody's Cool by a New York band called Lotion which he
currently favours. As the apocryphal story goes, Pynchon is the client of a banker who is
the mother of Rob Youngberg, a band member. Seeing Lotion's first album, Full Isaac,
on her desk one day, Pynchon's curiosity was piqued and after hearing the band he offered
to write liner notes for their next album. The liner notes themselves are
full of pop cultural allusions, from "The Love Boat," to "Monster
Mash," and so on. Pynchon praises the band's sense of humour, claiming that beneath
"the formal requirements of rock and roll as we have come to know it," Lotion
displays the humour and musical facility of a lounge combo. He calls rock music "one
of the last honorable callings." If you like a funky back-beat
ala David Byrne's or Adrian Belew's "Big Electric Cat" rhythms, Lotion may be
for you. Interestingly, Lotion has become something of a featured band on WB's TV series, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and have made an appearance on the show, playing a gig at the
Bronze. Tom was no where in sight.
Pynchon's
Liner Notes
Nobody's Fool
The name of Lotion's first
album is Full Isaac, which besides getting instant screams of recognition from Love
Boat rerun watchers everywhere, shows an attentive nostalgia at work -- not to mention
some dream of an endless cruise, upon which Nobody's Cool is the next leg of the
band's creative itinerary. As beneath the austerities of twelvetone music may lurk some
shameless piece of baroque polyphony, so, throughout this album, beneath the formal
demands of rock and roll as we have come to know it, between the metal anthems and moments
of tonal drama, the darkest of surrealist lyrics, the most feedback-stricken,
edge-of-chaos guitar passages, may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a
cruise combo, even an allegiance to the parameters thereof, the lounge chords on
"Namedropper" and "Rock Chick," the bass line of
"Juggernaut," so forth. But . . . it's supposed to be
the Millenium here -- the Apocalypse, right? -- worse it's New York in the middle of a
seasonal charm deficiency -- and these guys are smiling? Well, not exactly. If it's a
cruise gig, it sure runs through peculiar waters, full of undetonated mines from the
cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just
over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them
to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been
to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is
after all where these guys are from. The recording studio is half a
block from the subway. Times Square is being vacated and jackhammered into somebody's idea
of an update. Next door to Peepland, up in a control room out of The Jetsons, the band,
between takes, are discussing Bobby "Boris" Pickett, on whose 1962 hit
"Monster Mash" it turns out Rob's substitute music teacher in elementary school
played saxophone. Everybody here knows the record, not necessarily the Birth of Rap, less
an influence than something trying to find a pathway through to us here in our own
corrupted and perilous day, when everybody's heard everything and knows more than they
wish they did. It's never certain how these things will be carried on, but mysteriously it
happens. Every night, somewhere on the outlaw side of some town, below some metaphysical
14th Street, out at the hard edges of some consensus about what's real, the continuity is
always being sought, claimed, lost, found again, carried on. If for no other reason, rock
and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of
everyday life. Which is basically what these guys do.
And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love
Boat staff always sez, welcome aboard.
CDs
Nobody's Cool
(Original cover shown above)
Lotion / Audio CD / Released 1996
Our Price: $11.49
The Agnew
Funeral E.P.~ Ships in 2-3 days
Lotion / Audio CD / Released 1995
Our Price: $9.49
The Telephone
Album ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Lotion / Audio CD / Released 1998
Our Price: $13.47
