REVIEW: LINUS PAULING QUARTET: ALL THINGS ARE LIGHT

Our favorite thing that any critic has ever written about a Linus Pauling Quartet album is by Q Magazine, who commented "A large red sticker proclaiming WEIRD ALERT could not make things plainer." This was sort of the impression that had always carried with us about LP4, especially considering we knew them more through the man-about-internet writings of their man-about-town guitarist Ramon Medina than any actual first-person encounter with their music (this is not to say that Ramon is especially weird or anything, just that the threat of weirdness is a thread in most writing about them. Ok , actually, the button up silk shirts are a little weird). So, aside from a single (rather hazy) show, we really went into the listening process for this record expecting something that would confuse us like Balaclavas. To the contrary.

The other thing we often read about LP4 is that they are a psychedelic rock band. However, lighter than Philadelphia Cream Cheese is their reliance on flange, delay, loops, phase, chorus or any of the multi-tracking schenanigans that make it easy to tell which Beach Boys songs are from Pet Sounds and which are not. Yes, there is a little trip here and there (how could there not be in a nine minute song about alien abductions, though using a wah pedal on a guitar solo alone hardly makes one psychedelic), but its nothing that couldn't be chalked up to making music in post-modern era (read: there are no influences because everything is an influence).

Nope, if we had to use a single term to describe what was going on here, and you know we are going to use a single term because we are sick of not having this review done, that term would be grunge.

Grunge.

First off - eat it, we like grunge rock and this is not meant as a jab or something. Frankly, we're really over reviewing records (and writing in general) right now and just want to push out our thoughts on them, and so we're not ashamed to go back and resurrect the original meanings of a genre whose earliest prognosticators cannot be held responsible for the number of Candlebox , Creed and Collective Soul records currently inhabiting the cut-out bin at your local record store. We're all about those first couple Soundgarden and Mudhoney records. Never stopped listening to them. We love the bigness of them - sure there was louder and heavier stuff - but it all went too fast, and therefore was a small blur rather than a hulking bantha. And that's grunge for us - not JC Penny clothing collections or DOD effects pedals, but a gigantic hairy beast meandering out of the cold wet Pacific northwest with backpacks made of humbuckers and sleeves made of drop d tuning.

The fact that we take to these two acts in particular (as opposed to doling out Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains as favorites - though real talk, they are as well), has something to do with why we have been listening to this record as much as we have without actually pushing in the clutch and engaging the right mental gears to get a review of it out of the garage. First off - let's do some thematic investigation and correlation. The great thing about Mudhoney , Mark Arm once said (approximately) was that they had songs about dogs and being sick. In other words, they did not wrestle with weighty subjects - and that's whats appealed to us about them. Quick examination of All Things Are Light (isn't the title itself, by the way, telling us not to expect too heavy of material), and we can see similar thematic impulses, those being drunkenness (She Bad, She Throwed, Old Crow, 40oz), fast food (Enchirito), and sword metal (Waiting for the Axe to Fall).

But as much as it was the puerile nature of Mudhoney's lyrics that appealed to our still very teenage mind, it was the aforementioned largeness of Soundgarden that worked antidote to their unfortunate occasional mustering of subject matters inappropriate for an Archie Comic; big crunchy chords that get rode on out while the leaden lead line drives the melody forward; building, tearing down abruptly, building up again. We dig on it, but we wouldn't guess that they necessarily do. There isn't any sort of obvious grabs from the Soundgarden playbook here, more likely it's just a coincidence of tone, equipment and approach - and it works for us.

We've been told repeatedly that LP4 worked really hard on the album, and that shows in the production, the music and the packaging. Frankly, we wished this review did a better job of communicating that to you (or communicating anything at all) - but what just took you two minutes to read took us nine hours to write and we're over it. We're going back to just listening to it. Recommended.

MP3: Linus Pauling Quartet - Alien Abduction