T A B L E__T A L K

The road to "poptopia" is paved with many bands. Discuss them in the Music area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Robbie Robertson
Contact From the Underworld of Redboy
Capitol
(03/18/98)

Steve Poltz
One Left Shoe
Mercury
(03/17/98)

Various artists
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger
Red House Records
(03/16/98)

Towa Tei
Sound Museum
Elektra
(03/13/98)

Buju Banton
Inna Heights
VP Records
(03/12/98)

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BROWSE THE
MUSIC ARCHIVES

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V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
Fan-fare
Al Franken and Judas Priest get by with a little help from their fans
(03/20/98)

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I N T E R V I E W

Death and violence in rock 'n' roll
By Cynthia Joyce
An interview with Mikal Gilmore
(03/19/98)

________________[ _T H E_G L A S S_I N T A C T _]

                            M U D  R E C O R D S       

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | Elizabeth Elmore of the Champaign, Ill., quartet Sarge sings in the sort of sweet, girlish voice that, coming from dozens of other remembered and forgotten singers, has caused untold legions of club boys to stand moony-eyed and worshipful at the front of the stage during a set and then offer to schlep equipment afterward. It's a voice that plays right into the male fantasy of finding an angel whose sweet voice and sweet smile carry the promise of even sweeter sex. And on Sarge's lacerating and undeniable second album, "The Glass Intact," Elmore rips that fantasy to shreds.

"I'm not the angel that he wishes I could be," Elmore sings on the opening track, "Stall," and it's hard to imagine anyone listening to that voice -- a knife dipped in sugar -- ever making the mistake of hearing her as just another sweet young thing. Or the mistake of hearing Sarge as just another band with a knack for writing sweet and crunchy pop songs. The songs are catchy all right, but their emotional state is so raw, their drama so unresolved, that time and again the abrupt endings bring you up short. What's going on in these songs bleeds beyond the boundaries of their three- and four-minute lengths. They draw on the tunefulness of pop, the energy of punk and something shared by artists as disparate and connected as Nirvana or Neil Young -- an almost physical sense of weight and depth that gives the music space for rumination.

Everything about "The Glass Intact" -- from the production by the band and Matt Allison to the freedom and discipline in the playing of Elmore and new guitarist Pat Cramer, bassist Rachel Switzky and drummer Chad Romanski -- sharpens, deepens and expands the sound and the meanings of Sarge's 1996 "Charcoal." Elmore, who writes with a short-story writer's eye for compact narrative and telling detail, is a clear-eyed romantic pessimist. The literal subjects of the songs on "The Glass Intact" are relationships gone wrong because of betrayal or insecurity, sex that's both barbed and alluring, attractions not acted on, the sadness of love affairs that find their only peace in the early morning hours between sleep and waking, all the necessary, unnecessary and sometimes cruel acts of self-preservation to which desire drives people.

It may sound strange to speak of the freedom conveyed by an album of songs about people running up against boundaries. But freedom (which, of course, is not the same thing as happiness) pervades "The Glass Intact," whose truest subject is what it means to belong to a group of people who have achieved a shared, intuitive language. In other words, the camaraderie that has always been one of the best promises of rock 'n' roll. That's what you hear on every track of "The Glass Intact." You can't make music like this without either confidence or respect for the other people engaged in the enterprise, without a commitment to making each voice no more nor no less audible than any other.

In "Charms and Feigns," Elmore sings as a woman whose best friend has taken up with the singer's old lover. This uneasy trio is stuck with each other over the course of an evening where all parties have made a tacit agreement to keep on their social disguises. Romanski's drumming, a series of sustained military-style drum rolls that manage to be both as insistent and as light as a steady rain, function as the warnings Elmore can't bring herself to give to her girlfriend, the unspoken thoughts that lay beneath her forced smiles. The spare and delicate piano lines Elmore lays on the end of the track are a plaintive elegy for what awaits her friend, and for her own desire once felt for the lover whose ploys she now sees so clearly.

The closing track, "To Keep You Trained," takes off from a bass solo by Switzky that may call to mind Peter Hook's work with New Order. Coming after the maelstrom of the rest of the album, the rubbery tranquillity of Switzky's playing is like some promise of peace, reassurance that the band's fearless honesty is the right road if not always the easy one. "To Keep You Trained" features some of Elmore's most extreme and beautiful imagery: "I lit your face and rubbed my fingers through the flame." By the time she sings, "I can feel my chest collapsing," the words suggest Elvis Presley's erotic self-immolation in "Burning Love" (where he sang, "My chest is a-heaving") transmuted into a sort of crushed equilibrium.

But the real eloquence on "The Glass Intact" is the unvarnished kind that comes from plain speech. This is a band that means to communicate directly, whether what they're communicating is the pop pleasures of "Put in the Reel" or the nasty sexual dance of "I Took You Driving," in which Elmore's voice suggests both the sneer with which Jessica Lange dared Jack Nicholson to fuck her in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and a morning-after self-disgust. What's most devastating on "The Glass Intact" is that nothing is held back, no punches are pulled. At a time when frankness in popular music has come to mean the cartooned macho scenarios of hip-hop, and when indie rock has come to stand for a certain musical and lyrical obliqueness, Sarge's forthrightness can be startling. We're not spared the tale of gang rape and the victim's revenge in the scarifying "A Torch," and there's no coyness in Elmore's admitting the possibility of being attracted to a woman in "Fast Girls."

Perhaps the most famous 45 sleeve in all of rock 'n' roll is the Sex Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun," with its photo of a middle-class family sitting down to a meal and the labels "Nice lady," "Nice table," etc. pointing to various sections of the picture. It was a joke on our assumptions about surface realities. By now, the joke should be extended to include the way some rock fans and critics automatically react to a group of nice-looking young people singing and playing catchy pop songs. No doubt there'll be some who hear "The Glass Intact," or who've seen Sarge perform one of their typically self-effacing shows, and think, "Nice kids," or "Nice sound." But if punk still means the determination to speak as yourself instead of from behind the distanced role of rock star; an understanding of rock 'n' roll not as rebellion but as relentless questioning of all motives, assumptions, choices; and a sense of freedom that excludes neither contingency nor elation, then Sarge are punks to their souls. "The Glass Intact" offers the exhilaration of hearing a young band find its voice and the satisfaction of feeling you're being talked to honestly, directly, as an adult, free to join the conversation.
SALON | March 20, 1998