Biography
Mention the term "RIO"
around a prog fan, and Thinking Plague is probably the first
band that comes to mind. This is not because they're archetypical
of the genre; in fact, composer and guitarist Mike Johnson hates
the term. As a matter of fact, Thinking Plague is fairly
eclectic, drawing from Henry Cow and Art Bears but also from
a variety of styles ranging from symphonic prog (evident mainly
on In Extremis) to post-punk (on the debut) to Peter
Gabriel's solo work (on the title track of Moonsongs).
However, the band gets a good deal of visibility in the prog
scene, partially due to the symphonic overtones of In Extremis
and partially due to the fact that they're one of the more accessible
RIO-influenced bands around, and thus get recommended fairly
often. Well, that and the fact that they frickin' rule.
:)
Anyway.
Thinking Plague evolved in the early 80s from the work of Mike
Johnson and multi-instrumentalist Bob Drake, who apparently
met when Drake put up an ad seeking a guitar player "into Henry
Cow, Yes, etc." (there's that eclecticism again).
In 1983, they and a few co-conspirators recorded their first
album, ...a Thinking Plague, in a meat-packing studio,
surrounded by bloody entrails -- or at least, that's how Bob
Drake tells it. The music fit the location, drawing from
RIO, punk, 20th-century classical music, new wave and progressive
rock in varying amounts. It was released in a limited
edition on the band's own label, Dead Man's Curve, each cover
hand-painted by Drake. Instruments included bowed balalaika,
casio mini-synth, metal pipes and cat, as well as the more standard
vocals, guitars, bass and drums.
By the time of
their second album, Moonsongs, things had improved a
bit. They now were recording in a warehouse called The
Yogurt Factory (later shortened to "The Yog Factory"), and they
had a new vocalist named Susanne Lewis. In This Life
was even released on CD by RéR, which gave it a good
deal more exposure than the first two. These albums were
generally more focussed and serious than the debut, which probably
helped as well.
Then things fell
apart. Susanne Lewis moved to New York to further her
career as an indie/punk songwriter, and Bob Drake moved to LA
to be a recording engineer, and then joined 5uu's. It
wasn't until the mid-to-late 90s that Thinking Plague reformed
with new vocalist Deborah Perry, drummer Dave Kerman (from 5uu's),
and a variety of others. 1998's In Extremis combined
four new songs with a couple of older tracks recorded in the
early 90s by a transitional incarnation of the band. The
album was surprisingly cohesive, given the way it was pieced
together from new and old material, and is certainly their most
popular album in the progressive rock community.
2000 brought Early
Plague Years, a two-on-one CD rerelease that allowed many
people to hear the first two albums for the first time.
A new Plague album is due out in 2003.
- Alex Temple [October 2001]
...a
Thinking Plague (1984)
Thinking
Plague's almost-self-titled debut may come as a surprise to
listeners familiar with their more recent work. Although
the band's trademark angular melodies and dissonant chords are
a constant throughout their career, the symphonic textures and
seriousness of purpose of (most of) 1998's In Extremis
are all but absent here. The music has a stripped-down,
almost punk feeling to it, as well as a mood of playful experimentation
that would make it hard to take the music seriously if it weren't
so damn good. The album even gets downright silly at times.
For example, there's
"I Do Not Live," in which the super-distorted voices of Bob
Drake and Mike Johnson alternate with exaggeratedly tortured
vocals from Sharon Bradford. This is combined with bizarre lyrics
like "I am also using you using me / We're just like two laboratory
rats," convulsive atonal guitar work, weird synth noises, and
the violently abrupt mood shifts that result from recording
more-than-four-track music on a four-track recorder. Oh,
and there's a funeral dirge in the middle, for no real reason
other than "because they can."
Or how about "How
To Clean Squid"? This is the band's setting of instructions
from a gourmet cooking magazine on... well, how to clean squid.
There's a mixture of sardonic chanting and creepily angelic
singing, with occasional high sustained notes on words like
"cartilage," suspended over a blistering punkish setting accompanied
by what sound like new-wave drum machines. The rhythms
are typically disjointed, leading to prosody like "still at-TATCHED!
un-der COLD! run-ning WA! terrr..." Somehow, the song
comes off as being not only bizarre but really scary, especially
when phrases like "above eyes" are echoed with more highly-distorted
vocals from the group's co-founders.
You think that's
weird? You ain't heard nothin' yet. "The Taste That
Lingers On" is a repetitive little piece by Bradford, with lyrics
about a "very sweet taste like over-sugared fruit" and "a gray
mass that sticks to the teeth," set to music that's almost equally
nauseating, especially at the end when the tape speed seems
to waver, causing a gradual rise and fall of pitch. This
is surrounded on either side by two short compositions by Drake,
one of which features a Speak-N-Spell recorded over a telephone,
and the other of which seems to be played entirely on several
bowed balalaikas.
As if to remind
the listener that these are, in fact, serious musicians, there
are also two longer and less silly songs, "Possessed" and "Thorns
of Blue and Red / the War." Strangely, these strike me
as the two weaker songs on the album. "Possessed," as
those of you who own In This Life know, is a very good
song featuring plaintive vocals and some fierce atonal rocking-out
-- until about five minutes into it, when some insanely cheesy
synth arpeggios suddenly appear and ruin everything. "Thorns
of Blue and Red / the War" is a setting of two poems found in
a trash can outside a mental hospital, and while it contains
some excellent music (including vocals from Bradford's husband
Mark, who has both a wonderful classical baritone and a powerful
falsetto), it's just too long. The improvised middle section
by "Great Banana" (Drake, Johnson and the Bradfords on instruments
including "noises, glasses, [and] cat") gets very close to inaudibility,
and brings the song to a dead halt. It would take another
couple of years before Thinking Plague really gained the ability
to do a great 15-minute song -- the astounding "Moonsongs" from
the album of the same name. Still, this is generally an
excellent and underrated album, quite worthy of the Thinking
Plague name and perhaps a good way to get fans of quirky post-punk
like Kukl into the avant-prog/RIO scene. -
Alex Temple [October 2001]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
Moonsongs
(1986)
From the very
beginning of the album, you can tell that this band is pissed
off. "Warheads" is probably Thinking Plague's hardest-rocking
tune, opening with an angry chromatic guitar and bass riff before
joining them with loud synth drums (reminiscent of XTC's The
Big Express) and the voice of TP's second vocalist, Susanne
Lewis. The lyrics are much more direct than on the band's
other albums, as seen in the opening lines: "People killing
time, hiding in their minds murder / They're looking for a goat,
gonna cut his throat." There's also a heavy dose of bitter
irony: Lewis is quickly joined by a male voice apathetically
reciting prayers: "Jesus loves me, this I know, 'cause the Bible
tells me so." As it continues, "Warheads" turns
out to be practically a microcosm of the band's entire oeuvre,
echoing the punk aggression of ...a Thinking Plague and
predicting In Extremis's the skittery guitar lines and
spacey drones. Susanne Lewis, new at the time of Moonsongs'
release, gets a chance to show her amazing versatility, from
the aforementioned shrieks to her usual indie-rock disaffectedness
to a surprising bit about three minutes in that sounds a little
bit like Dagmar Krause.
"Warheads" is
followed by "Etude for Combo," a brittle, percussive and somewhat
minimalistic instrumental whose main motif later appeared in
"Organism" and "Les Etudes d'Organism." Here it's played
live by Bob Drake, Mark Fuller, Eric Moon and Mike Johnson for
a small audience of friends, and the tension is palpable when,
halfway in, the band asks the onlookers to scream along with
them: "ONE! TWO! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!" At
that moment, the music seems to be momentary thrown off balance,
as Thinking Plague's characteristic rhythmic disjointedness
allows them to throw in a quick solo for something that sounds
like a bicycle bell before starting on an amazing section that
combines rock instrumentation and propulsiveness with 20th-century
classical harmonic and melodic materials and the swung rhythms
of jazz. With its syncopated keyboard parts, this passage
is surprisingly funky -- a quality that isn't usually associated
with the RIO movement and its derivatives.
The next two tracks
are quieter, and serve as a moment of respite before the title
track. "Collarless Fog that one day soon" is another instrumental
track, improvised during the "Etude for Combo" sessions, and
it consists mainly of quietly unsettling quasi-tonal guitar
figures over a backdrop that sounds like Henry Cow gone ambient.
"Inside Out" is even more pulseless, featuring Susanne Lewis's
disembodied voice floating over blurry keyboard drones from
Bob Drake. Lewis also wrote the lyrics, and they have
a mysterious quality that's very different from Mike Johnson's
political intellectualism; here we get phrases like "do we kill
what we love the most?" and "how I am in your moving hand, loving
you inside out." It's an enormously beautiful, almost
wistful song, almost never talked about and reminiscent of some
of the more abstract vocal tracks on Biota's Object Holder.
But then again,
it's easy to understand how "Inside Out" could be overshadowed
by the final track of the album. "Moonsongs" is an orgy of tribal
percussion, furious bass playing, "vocal parts" played on sampling
keyboards, gritty atonal guitar solos and apocalyptically environmentalist
lyrics. At one point Susanne Lewis takes on the persona
of a pagan priestess, creating a call-and-response chant in
which her vaguely religious-sounding declarations ("I am a lure
from paradise") are answered by similar exaltations by Drake
and Johnson ("She is a flood across a plain"). The aforementioned
sampling keyboard section is a truly wonderful moment that will
make any TP neophyte's jaw drop in confusion as you giggle mischievously,
in which growling synths, guitar and slap bass battle with "oo"s
and "ta"s manipulated into squelchy dissonant counterpoint.
The climax of the piece finds Lewis playing the part of Nature
as an innocent little girl, singing lines like "They kill and
rape my children / Preach falsehoods, which they say God gave
them" in a flat, childlike voice. Quiet piano figures
and ominous synths lie in wait for about half a minute before
the the opening tune reappears over the 80s-sounding drums of
"Warheads," no longer calmly floating but filled with biterness
and disgust. Lewis angrily denounces industrial pollution with
all the heavy-handedness of Thinking Plague's early idols the
Art Bears, combined with pseudo-Lovecraftian rhetoric like "Very
soon you will know again the darkness of my timeless womb."
A series of absolutely killer guitar solos bring the song to
a conclusion before it fades into the distance with a minute
or so of quiet synth and guitar work.
Weirdly, when
I look back at my description of "Moonsongs" here, it sounds
terrible. Vocal posturing, pretentious lyrics, "world
music" influences -- aren't these things I usually complain
about? Well, yes they are, but Thinking Plague manages
to pull it off admirably, due partially to their impeccable
sense of timing, partially to Susanne Lewis's strong anti-symphonic
tastes (not to mention the fact that she's simply a brilliant
vocalist), and partially to the sheer strength and consistency
of Mike Johnson's compositional vision. "Moonsongs" is
one of the best songs the band has released yet, and Moonsongs,
the album, is nothing short of amazing. If there's
anything bad I can say about this album, it's that it's not
long enough. -
Alex Temple [October 2001]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
In
This Life (1989)
One of the
first phrases that comes up when Thinking Plague is mentioned
on rec.music.progressive is "accessible RIO." Composer
and guitarist Mike Johnson's distaste for the term "RIO"
notwithstanding, the description is fairly accurate, and
nowhere is it more so than on this album. While all
the usual elements of Thinking Plague's sound -- constantly
changing meters, dissonant harmonies, non-tonal pitch language
-- are present on In This Life, the album is definitely
warmer and friendlier than the rest of the band's output.
Rhythms are more fluid than in their earlier work -- sure,
a song like "Lycanthrope" still switches between 5/4 and
4/4 every other measure, but the effect is strangely natural
rather than aggressively jumpy. The texture is also
simpler: for the most part, the bombastic symphonics of
In Extremis and the jerky heaviness of the first
two albums are replaced by a more chambery texture, heavy
on woodwinds and featuring a lot of acoustic and undistorted
electric guitar playing. The arrangements are very deliberate;
Johnson makes extensive use of the technique of punctuating
a downbeat by removing rather than adding an instrument.
"Run Amok," for instance, opens as a bouncy, vaguely klezmer-ish
tune for clarinet, piano and voice, but every other measure
is underscored by a thud of heavy electric guitar, drums
and baritone sax. Elsewhere, synthesizers are used
to emphasize certain sections: much of "Lycanthrope" is
fleshed out by barely audible synth lines in the background,
and the sudden, unexpected entrace of a huge pile of dissonant
synth chords (think Gentle Giant's "Proclamation") two and
a half minutes into "Love" is one of the most powerful moments
on the album.
What really
makes the album so listener-friendly, though, is Susanne
Lewis. Her background was not avant-prog but indie
rock, and she has the warm, unaffected simplicity that would
later become popular among bands like the Essex Green and
Freezepop. (In fact, she only does one note with vibrato
on the entire album -- but I'll let you find that.
It's a killer.) She's also a very good indie songwriter,
as evidenced by her later band Hail; In This Life
is a more collaborative effort than a lot of Plague, and
here Lewis writes a good number of the vocal melodies.
While they certainly don't sound like indie (except for
"Fountain of All Tears" and the slightly sardonic
spoken-word sections of "Love"), they're also catchier and
more conventionally "melodic" than most of Johnson's melodies.
Rather than being convoluted and angular like In Extremis,
many of the tunes here are at their core octatonic, modal,
or even tonal -- although pure tonality is always thrown
off by out-notes in some other instrument.
That's the
"accessible" part. As for the "RIO" part... yes, it's
true that the term technically only refers to the eight
bands that participated in the RIO festivals in the late
70s, but the influence of those bands is probably stronger
here than only any other Plague release. "Malaise"
has some of the heavy starkness of the Art Bears, although
Lewis's voice is nothing like Dagmar Krause's. Parts
of the album suggest late Henry Cow in their harmonic motion,
and "Love" ends with a bit of circus music -- an homage
to Samla? But the centerpiece of the album is the
astounding "Organism," which reminds me more than anythiing
else of Aksak Maboul -- it's got hints of Middle Eastern
music, repetetive percussion grooves, and even Fred Frith!
The song is another "percussive epic" like the title track
of Moonsongs, but constructed differently -- more
minimalist than maximalist. It opens with a gradual
but very intense polyrhythmic buildup, in which a chromatic
7/8 groove and 4/4 drumming are overlaid with increasingly
noisy improvisation from Frith's guitar and Lawrence Haugseth's
piano. The middle section of the piece contains a
beautiful passage that would later get ruined in In Extremis's
"Les Études d'Organism," in which Susanne Lewis sings
strangely evocative lyrics ("Droplet / Held between glass
for platelet high or low") to an octatonic melody so compressed
that when it leaps a fourth it feels like an octave.
Later, Drake's rather unorthodox violin playing and ethnic
percussion give the song an Arabic flavor. Halfway
in, a brief passage with Drake, Johnson and Haugseth singing
over heavy guitars gives way to a "breakdown" cadence played
on junk. The track ends with five and a half minutes
of gradual buildup and release, the basic rhythm alternating
measures of 4/4 and 5/4 as different types of percussion
provide variations in timbre and intensity -- a bit like
the ending of the Art Bears' "Moeris Dancing."
These RIO
comparisons are, of course, not meant to suggest that In
This Life is in any way derivative or lacking in creativity.
Indeed, its surreal, calm but tense beauty is unlike any
other piece of music I know. The RIO influence is
strong, but it's tempered by the aforementioned Susanne
Lewis DIY vibe, subtle hints of symphonic prog (particularly
Gentle Giant and 70's Crimson) and the distinctive and instantly
recognizable harmonic language of Mike Johnson. The
album is an astounding piece of work, and it would be an
excellent choice either as an introduction to avant-prog
(it was mine) or as a worthy companion for the RIO fan's
Henry Cow and 5uu's albums.
Oh, right.
Bonus tracks. At the time this CD was released, it
made sense to include tracks from the first two albums,
which were out of print. Now that Early Plague
Years has been released, they're pretty superfluous,
especially since this mix of "Moonsongs" is less energetic
and thus less powerful than the original. The contemplative
lyricism of "Fountain of All Tears" makes a better ending
anyway.
- Alex Temple [January 2002]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
In
Extremis (1998)
The
first time I heard Thinking Plague was at NEARfest 2000,
when I found them interesting in a novelty kind of way.
Being my first experience with the RIO sub-genre, I was
pleasantly surprised by their somehow soothing and melodically
inventive style. I found myself closing my eyes and
just feeling the music.. as well as dozing off a couple
times during the set. My first experience with this
album didn't last too long. I turned if off midway,
and listened to the rest later. The music was just
a little to strange for me to get into. However, I
recently pulled it out again and have been listening incessantly,
and each time I find myself getting more and more involved
in it's wonderful collage of displaced melodies, churning
rhythms and completely creative instrumentation. The
overarching feel is immense and dissonant, yet not as oppressive
or difficult to listen to as I'd expected from a RIO group.
After sitting down with the album, the brilliant complexity
and care of the arrangements really shines through.
"Dead
Silence" is a magnificent opener, kicking off with a chugging
guitar line and Deborah Perry's distinctive vocals.
Her voice is initially off-putting, as it has a tendency
to jump from note to note in a seemingly illogical and atonal
fashion, though it's remarkable how natural and pretty it
actually sounds after getting used to it. Another
major treat is the cool "Les Etudes D'Organism", which actually
features some semi-conventional "prog" melodies amongst
it's chaotic carinval-from-hell like feel. This is
just a magnificently composed work, and I really wish I
could see them live again after hearing this album.
Don't be scared off by the RIO label, this is simply truly
progressive music that pushes boundaries. Definitely
on the cutting edge of the current progressive rock scene.
- Greg
Northrup [February 2001]