parlando

tuxedomoon, "crash" (1980)

Posted on September 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #18

Tuxedomoon were possibly the most straightforwardly pretentious band on the arty but goofy Ralph Records label in the late 1970s, best known for the Residents and also featuring underground expermentalists like Snakefinger, Renaldo and the Loaf, Fred Frith, Yello, and MX-80 Sound. Tuxedomoon were less silly and more moody than most of their labelmates; over time their various members tended toward soundscapes, but early Tuxedomoon records were recognizably songs, albeit pretty odd songs.

"Crash" is an instrumental, the b-side of their great single "What Use?", probably their best known song. "Crash" was not included on either of Tuxedomoon's (excellent) first two albums, Half-Mute and Desire; so far as I can tell, it only ever appeared on two Tuxedomoon records, neither of which was ever issued on cd: the Tuxedomoon compilation A Thousand Lives By Picture, and the Ralph Records compilation Frank Johnson's Favorites. In the time I've had no turntable -- most of the last fifteen years -- I had fruitlessly searched for "Crash", because it's one of my favorite instrumental rock songs ever. I never found it on peer-to-peer networks, though frustratingly I found several copies of another mix of the song, which were very different and lacked the power of the one I knew.

But! a few months ago some wonderful person uploaded an early 1980s album called Night Air by keyboardist / violinist / guitarist Blaine L. Reininger, co-founder of Tuxedomoon. Though I had a few later Reininger records, I'd never seen this one, and it included this copy of "Crash", which -- hurrah! -- is absolutely the version I knew and loved. So at this point I'm unsure whether to list it as Tuxedomoon or Reininger -- but the physical records I had credited it to Tuxedomoon, so I'm going with that for now.

"Crash" is a simple song, alternating between two parts, each of which winds up tension and releases it repeatedly. A guitar howls throughout, a layer of melodic noise behind the lead piano. Drum rolls punctuate the end of every passage. The two piano hooks are a simple ascending and descending line, and a down-up, down-up, UP-down-down-down-down-down one. No bridge, no coda, no intro, really, just a kind of fade-in. What makes it work so intensely for me, I think, is the layer of tension the guitar lays on. While the piano releases its melodic tension every time it winds it up, the guitar just keeps squawling, never letting go. I think my favorite moment of the song is when the second part has been going on for bar after bar after bar -- the first part was relatively short -- and finally explodes back into the first part at 3:08, after the guitar has drifted up to one long high howl. That transition comes back around again at 4:08; if I had any complaint about the song, it would be a wish that they'd go through the changes again one more time. If you listen to "Crash" a second time, check out the restlessness of the drumming, which constantly plays small variations on the beat, never enough to break the rhythm, coloring the song just under the immediately perceived surface. One last thing: I love the way the song sits there and vibrates just a little after the cold stop at the end, humming like a great machine.

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