3 out of 5

Label: Knitting Factory Records

Produced by: David Weinstein, No Safety (recorded by)

I like to believe that every album is someone’s favorite, or formative for someone. When you hear something frames the experience: if you heard band X before band Y, your brain might draw some lines between X and Y that either don’t exist, or maybe more realistically would / should be drawn going from Y to X.

So: I travel back, sonically, to the early 90s NY artrock scene. I’ve got a lot in my catalogue from that time and place; from Chicago of the same time. But No Safety – mostly centered around multi-instrumentalists / vocalists Chris Cochrane and Zeena Parkins – is new to me, either skipped over by my brain for whatever reason, or maybe really not coming up at all, as my impression is that the group burned bright and relatively fast on the outer edges of their scene, with various players remaining active (as technical contributors or performers) on the still-outer edges of music, occasionally popping up on more known – and representative – labels like Family Vineyard, or Tzadik. Youtube videos of No Safety tunes are accompanied by comments of “classic;” regalements of live shows. If You Know You Know kind of stuff. And had No Safety been one of my intros to all those jazz-informed, musical theorist weirdos of the late 80s / early 90s, I can imagine Spill as having more staying power for me, flirting with the nonsense funk of Thinking Fellers; the slacker punk of early Camper Van Beethoven or Monks of Doom. But even within this album itself I feel like you can sense hints of the temporary spell that brought its players together dissipating; output after this was primarily two live albums, then (as of this writing) nothing more. This is represented by the first third of the disc really dropping the mic on angular indie rock – often atonal and off-key, segueing from instrumental anarchy to liltingly melodic moments – to a midsection that lays bare the indulgence of the style, and then finally winding down into some relatively uninspired jam sessions on the last third. It’s rather like hearing the band run out of steam.

The production from David Weinstein and the band is perfect for this kind of stuff, featuring the somewhat washed out sound of late 80s recordings, but level-balanced such that highs and lows have equal punch, and Cochrane’s and Parkins’ vocals get some nice frazzled edges as they croon above the clatter. And ‘clatter’ is where the album generally succeeds, doing a kind of acoustic early-Pavement shuffle, blended to / with an appreciation for a funky beat – something that carried through a lot of these jazz-influenced artsy bands. The lyrics feel of a sociopolitical bent at first, but start to tipple into navel-gazing proetics as the tunes get looser and less immediate. Occasional instrumentals help to break things up, reminding somewhat of TFUL282’s ‘feller filler.’

Alas, given my rant above, none of this really coalesces into something that… doesn’t sound like bits and bobs of other things. I’m trying to imagine stumbling across No Safety much earlier in my music hunting career, and I feel like it would’ve been similar to my current take: the opening part of this album truly bangs. It does a wide sweep of styles and emotions, and comes across very passionately, with the weirdness moderately forced, but varied enough to overcome that. But with that out of the way, it starts to feel a bit put-on; I can just imagine my past self really digging this, but only making solid memories out of the first several songs.