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Sharps & Flats
As a band, Sarge never knew how good they were. Fortunately, their post-break album "distant" makes a decent epitaph.

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By Charles Taylor

May 4, 2000 |   January 1996 was a rotten time for me. I'd suffered a loss, and I was so miserable that I couldn't tolerate music with lyrics. The band Sarge's first record, suggested by a friend, was the first album that I was able to listen to in weeks. At a time when I had no use for anything that didn't communicate directly, "Charcoal" sounded as if it were made by people who had no patience for anything else.

A few weeks later when the poppy punk band from Champaign, Ill., came to the Boston area, my wife and I went to see them and I was convinced of two things: that Sarge were making some of the most exciting rock 'n' roll around and that they had absolutely no idea how good they were.

Checkout Sarge at Virginmega.com Sarge "distant" Mud

After I wrote about the record and the performance, the band's bassist, Rachel Switzky, sent an e-mail of thanks. When Sarge returned to the same club a few months later, my wife and I went to see them again. We met up with them for a drink afterward and they wound up spending the night on our living room floor. Over the next few years, Romanski, Switzky and singer/songwriter/guitarist Elizabeth Elmore, along with other members who came and went, would spend many nights there. You can't spend time around a young band without becoming aware not just of how much they love playing music but also of what wears them down: lousy pay, the desire to become known without being false to themselves, the limits that choosing to remain independent place on getting your record in stores or on the radio. As Liz Phair said, "It's nice to be liked/But it's better by far to be paid." I wasn't surprised when the band split late last year.

I offer this story not just in the spirit of full disclosure, and not to lay some claim to coolness because I knew the band, but as a way of saying that "distant," Sarge's posthumous collection of demos, live tracks and B-sides, affects me as a friend as well as a fan. It's like a scrapbook of things too recently past to have lost the sting of missing them.

Much good art operates as if it were laying a trap, designed to lure you into snap judgments only to spring the trap shut and make clear the flimsiness of those judgments. The trap in Sarge -- and the key to the band -- was always Elizabeth Elmore's candy-coated pop voice. It was a voice that might have been right at home with the trash-pop she grew up listening to on the radio. You could imagine it bringing a core of a feeling to some of those manufactured songs that lodge themselves in your brain. (I always wanted to hear her take on Billie's "Honey to the Bee" or All Saints' "Never Ever.") Elmore is in her early 20s, and combined with her diminutive stature and her Betty Boop lips, her voice invited you to underrate her as one more cute little rock chick, singing one more batch of cute little pop songs, in one more cute little band.

"I'm not the angel that he wishes I could be," Elmore sang in the most self-aware line she's yet written (from the song "Stall"), a line directed as much at the listeners ready to attach that label of cuteness to her and Sarge as to the boy she was singing about. Elmore's vocals draw you in by holding out the romantic promise of pop music only to lay out scenarios of bitterness and regret, scenarios as emotionally blunt as they are sometimes narratively opaque. When she sings, "Every day I drove from your motel to my high school" (on "Homewrecker," from "The Glass Intact" album and repeated on "distant") there's no phony sullied-daisy hurt in her voice, no pretense of innocence.

In some ways the force of that line or the predicament of the young pregnant girl in "Chicago" or the rape victim in "A Torch" -- topics that she addressed for three full-length records -- come from the fantasies we want to entertain about what kind of person must possess as sweet a voice as Elmore's, the comforting lies we tell ourselves about young people, particularly young women. We want to pretend that someone as young as Elmore, someone who sounds like her, wouldn't know the sexual betrayal and usury that inhabit her songs. The calm bluntness of her voice shredded that fantasy.

"Distant" opens with three new songs that function as linked short stories. The undercurrent of sadness in the ebullient "Detroit Star-lite" takes over in the spare, evocative detail of the songs that follow. They are formally polished and emotionally raw, returning to the same breakup from different angles. It's as if Mary Gaitskill had opted to tell one of her tales in the form of "Run Lola Run." When Elmore sings of wandering through a house deserted by her love in "the end of july," the memories setting over her naked body have the finality of crematory ash.

But in the six live tracks that make up the heart of "distant," Elmore does perhaps the most direct singing she's yet done. Using a lower register, a more determinedly conversational tone, she gives the lyrics a cutting power. There's very little glee left in her account of the smart cookie she should have picked up at a "Madison punk-rock show" in "Fast Girls," another song that first turned up on "The Glass Intact." What's left is the sound of someone ruing a missed opportunity because what lies ahead doesn't seem so promising. When she sings, "I thought of her the whole way home when I should have been thinking of you," she sings as if she doesn't give a damn that she was unfaithful, if only in her thoughts. Behind her, Romanski, second guitarist Sue Roth and bassist Derek Niedringhaus make a sound that's more than equal to Elmore's no-regrets, no-excuses tone.

There is always a temptation to talk about a band as if they were no more than the image of their lead singer. Elmore focuses Sarge, but the sound you hear on these tracks (as on their two albums "Charcoal" and "The Glass Intact," both available from Parasol Distribution) is her engaged in a conversation with the band instead of declaiming. It's regrettable that Switzky is present on "distant" on only a couple of tracks; her febrile pliancy was an essential part of that conversation.

But throughout "distant," particularly on the thrilling live tracks, you hear a sound of a band speaking with one voice, neither lyrics nor music taking precedence but working together to a common meaning. Chad Romanski's downbeats and fills (particularly the military-style drum rolls on "the end of july" and the "Hound Dog"-like machine-gun fire of "Dear Josie, Love Robyn") are the sonic equivalent of the stray anxieties that make their way through Elmore's lyrics, anxieties that are given voice and then tamped down. On "Half as Far," which starts as a sensitive little ballad before cracking open halfway through, and "Homewrecker" the band's force and speed transmute into space and weight, stretching out to let the turmoil of the music inhabit acres and yet retaining enough control to bring it to a head. It's the sound of a band bronco-riding a hurricane.

The saddest thing about "distant" is that Sarge split just as they attained that tightness and intensity. Where the conversation Sarge began will lead its members in their next projects remains to be seen. Elmore is dividing her time between law school in Chicago and solo work. She may play some dates with Romanski.

If I had to pick a characteristic Sarge moment, it would be the one that ends Elmore's solo rendition of "the first morning." "I tried. Thanks," she shrugs as she brings the song to an end with an understatement that characterized the band as a whole. Sarge did a hell of a lot more than try. They transmitted the bracing thrill of people finding their own voice and saying exactly what they wanted to say.
salon.com | May 4, 2000

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