Though I’m sure I heard some of his work at an earlier date, I really became aware of Phil Kline during the 1996 Bang On A Can marathon, during which he premiered a piece titled (at the time) “Whole Lotta.” A work for twelve boomboxes, it entailed Kline singing into the first one and recording the pertinent Led Zep passage (“Woman! You-oo need….Loooooooooove!”) into it. As it was looped and replayed, Kline repeated the procedure with the second boombox, recorded that, played the two recordings back into the room, etc. and so on. Gradually, with each iteration, an immense, swirling roar was generated, sculpted by the room into an extraordinarily dense and rich, almost physical presence. Despite its clear indebtedness to works like Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out” (and with more than a nod to Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”) its grounding in rock provided a unique, admittedly nostalgic frisson of sheer thrill. After hearing this piece, I eagerly looked forward to future music from this fellow.
His subsequent disc on Emergency Music, Glow in the Dark, was something of a disappointment, containing a retitled version of “Whole Lotta” (here called “Chant” — possibly for copyright reasons) that was drastically sapped of the power shown in the live performance as well as several other works that lacked the same imagination or staying power.
Zippo Songs, subtitled “airs of war and lunacy,” takes its title from inscriptions made on cigarette lighters bearing that brand name by American GIs in Vietnam and other conflicts. In some ways continuing in the footsteps of Harry Partch’s Barstow (in which hobo inscriptions carved into fence posts in the '30s served as text), Kline sets these bits of common-man poetry to music. There are only two problems. First, the self-consciousness that was pretty much lacking in the transient’s world of the Depression Era had settled in by the '60s and beyond, almost eliminating the natural and beautiful unforcedness of the Barstow text. Second, and more importantly, as a composer, Phil Kline is no Harry Partch.
The album begins with “Briefing,” a song that sounds remarkably like “Mea Culpa” from Brian Eno and David Byrne’s seminal “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” but lacks that piece’s giddy, frightening nervousness. As further prologue, Kline follows this with a short suite of three songs using text from Donald Rumsfeld press conferences. The words are well-known, circulated through e-mail under such trite titles as “The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld” and, like most such missives, derived a brief chuckle — maybe — and then were dumped. It’s simply not a rich enough lode to mine for more than a few seconds (in fact, without according him too much praise, Rumsfeld’s statement on how we often don’t know what we don’t know — included here — is one of the more honest pronouncements in recent years by a public official, hardly grounds for derision). It’s just too slight to bear this much weight. Similarly, the Zippo texts are banal but not in any potentially intriguing way. One (whose rhythm line is virtually purloined from Eno’s “Sombre Reptiles”) is based on the tired pseudo-Psalm (“yea though I walk ... I’m the meanest son of a bitch”). Rule: any cute text that has appeared on more than several million t-shirts has long since lost whatever resonance it may have had. Others feature juvenilia like, “Ours is not to do or die/Ours is to smoke and stay high.”
Such lines are sung by Theo Bleckmann in a pleasant though fairly nondescript voice, missing any opportunity, however slim, to invest some heft into the text. One might imagine a vocalist with the wry knowingness of a David Garland pulling this off, but Bleckmann’s efforts are immediately forgettable. Unfortunately, so is much of the music. With Kline on guitar supported by Todd Reynold’s violin and David Cossin’s percussion, the tunes meander in loose fashion, somewhere between art song and art rock, smooth and entirely palatable, but desperately needing a major infusion of grit and sinew. Kline sums thing up with a melancholy, languorous cover of The Door’s “The End,” actually one of the more successful songs on the disc, the overdubbed strings providing an unsettling bed for Bleckmann’s choirboy-like vocals. He may have meant the works to have an elegiac quality, to be a mournful protestation of war, but their sameness and utter lack of memorability renders any such effect moot. Zippo Songs disappoints as much as “Whole Lotta” excited.
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