AEM046 Life Partners

If you read Ampeater like I do, you prob­a­bly scroll down to the bot­tom of the page and hit play on the A-side of the sin­gle before you read one word of the review. Today in doing so you may have noticed that the first song is enti­tled “The Only Liv­ing Goy in Jew York.” There are two basic responses to this song title, 1) a laugh, or what­ever sound you make to express mirth while alone on the inter­net (mine is a sharp, tiny exhale of breath that makes it sound like some­one just stabbed me with a push­pin) 2) a beetling of brows and slight cant­ing for­ward of head and open­ing of mouth so as to indi­cate offense (actu­ally this is what peo­ple do in con­ver­sa­tion to indi­cate offense; I don’t think peo­ple on the inter­net really adjust their faces to match their emo­tions. Think about what your face does next time you type ‘lol’. It’s creep­ily blank, right?). You’ll prob­a­bly react to the music in one of those two ways, too, espe­cially the amaz­ing off-key falsetto deliv­ery of the song title, which sounds like a mup­pet after a night of guz­zling 151 and tor­tur­ing peo­ple for sex­ual plea­sure. The song also uses the word “kike” promi­nently. So, you know, peo­ple will prob­a­bly divide into two camps pretty quickly re: Life Part­ners. And you might not want to blast it at the office. Or around my dad.

On the other hand, tak­ing Life Part­ners, a band that often wears match­ing camo shirts and white pants live, seri­ously and at face value and then com­plain­ing about it is kind of like read­ing a novel writ­ten in a lan­guage you don’t know and com­plain­ing that it didn’t make sense. Take, for exam­ple, the hilar­i­ously tongue-in-cheek misog­yny of the title track from their last record, Men Are Talk­ing, which fea­tures lyrics like “Men are talk­ing / it’s a gift from our minds to the world / we got these things called ideas wouldn’t occur to you lit­tle girls” deliv­ered in a kind of eager sings­peak that man­ages to be a par­ody of the het­ero­sex­ual cock wor­ship of clas­sic rock and eight­ies metal with­out being in any way cute. It’s hard not to laugh when the gang vocals come in on the line “We are smart!” And then there’s a fuck­ing amaz­ing gui­tar solo. The thing about Life Part­ners that makes their records worth a damn beyond the ini­tial humor of the songs is that they will take a con­cept that seems fit for a nov­elty song and then actu­ally flesh it out with a musi­cally var­ied and bru­tally heavy arrange­ment, com­plete with melodic hooks, con­stantly shift­ing sec­tions, vio­lent trum­pet and gui­tar solos that shat­ter into nasty shards of noise.

Nearly every­thing about the music of Life Part­ners, a quar­tet (power trio plus trum­pet) fronted by Dave Dougan, bassist for Drag City’s fan­tas­tic psych band Major Stars, has rec­og­niz­able roots in the dudeliest of 70s and 80s rock: the half sung half-spoken vocals, the slow burn­ing jams, the acoustic intros, the epic gui­tar solos, the sim­ple catchy riffs, the pal­pa­ble heav­i­ness. Yet it all gets taken and exag­ger­ated in a way that makes it both funny and kind of threat­en­ing. The gui­tar solos rip and bend all over the place, nego­ti­at­ing not just the usual blues scales but also a kind of loose, atonal Ornette Cole­man ter­ri­tory, and then ascend­ing beyond melody into pure, aggres­sive noise…and are some­times deliv­ered on the trum­pet. The riffs are some­times amelodic and dis­so­nant. The vocals are peri­od­i­cally off-key in a way that is unset­tling, and they take the rock n roll affec­ta­tions of badass­ness and exag­ger­ate them into a kind of rock n roll car­toon. At the cli­max of the gui­tar solo on “Men Are Talk­ing,” when Dougan is scream­ing the title phrase over and over at the top of his lungs you’ll have for­got­ten that this was a joke, because it is heavy as fuck, awe­some in the way rock music has of being awe­some where there’s now way to describe it with­out sound­ing like an inar­tic­u­late idiot (i.e. “awesome”).

In addi­tion to the obvi­ous con­tro­ver­sial humor thing (I mean, the band has mul­ti­ple songs about AIDS), A-side “The Only Liv­ing Goy in Jew York” brings out all the other key ele­ments of the Life Part­ners sound: descend­ing bassline, fill-heavy drums, quar­ter note key­board chords, ridicu­lous falsetto, dis­torted trum­pet coun­ter­lines (that’s the trum­pet in your left ear, head­phone users) that devolve over the course of the song into rau­cous noise. One of the best things about the band, espe­cially live (they’re a fan­tas­tic, sweaty, ear-frying live band), is the way Greg Kelley’s trum­pet and Mike Dupuy’s gui­tar seem to chal­lenge one another. Life Part­ners is a jammy band, unlike most of the bands I like, and the real cli­max of the songs tends to come when the soloists are fac­ing off, push­ing each other higher and higher, often with Dougan’s shrieky ad-libs over the top of the whole mess. Live you get to see Dupuy’s per­fect gui­tar stance, Dougan ping pong­ing around the audi­ence and Kel­ley red­faced and falling over back­wards in a way that any­one who played trum­pet in mid­dle school can tell you will destroy your lips, but on the record­ings you can still get some idea of the inten­sity of these duels (turn the vol­ume up a lot). Check out 2:05, where the trum­pet and gui­tar acci­den­tally strike the same note and then lock into that lit­tle ascend­ing pat­tern together, repeat­ing it until the song snaps with the ten­sion and just kind of stops being a song

B-side “Wha’ Hap­pen?”, named, I’m pretty sure, after Fred Willard’s char­ac­ter in A Mighty Wind, fol­lows a pretty sim­i­lar pat­tern, albeit in a dif­fer­ent order, with a huge intro­duc­tory trumpet-guitar duel occu­py­ing the first few min­utes before the vocal break. The song quickly spins com­pletely out of con­trol, with the wildest sounds com­ing not from amps or ped­als but from Dougan’s pipes. Early in minute four, when the chordal back­ground falls away and you’re just left with the three soloists climb­ing all over each other, it really brings home how bizarre this music is, bizarre in a way that’s sur­pris­ingly easy to deal with when some rock-sounding chords are tying it to earth. Then, of course, they bring it all home with an out­tro that sounds like a slowed down, base­ment recorded ver­sion of a Van Halen song, key­board sus chords and all.

I men­tioned the gang vocals on the line “We are smart” ear­lier as some­thing to laugh at. And it is. But the thing is, the Life Part­ners are smart. Their lyrics are beyond vul­gar, but they are also incred­i­bly clever. The music is dif­fi­cult and noisy, but it is also con­stantly inven­tive and surprising.

In short, Life Part­ners are weird, offen­sive, con­fus­ing, per­verted and dif­fi­cult, and I can’t think of a bet­ter rea­son to lis­ten to them. I mean, who else is going to write us a song about a would be rapist who can’t keep it up when his vic­tim seems too will­ing, all built around the legal-sexual pun of the phrase “gets off”? Let’s not make the mis­take of tak­ing too seri­ously the men who posed for that band photo.

Gabe Birn­baum

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