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Like acquiring a taste for frog legs and seaweed, appreciating the sometimes-sluggish (albeit suspenseful) pace of Hitchcock films or making sense of a difficult piece of art at the museum, good and odd things come to those who wait. The sort of artists found on 5 Rue Christine Records — Kill Rock Stars' kid sister — certainly aren't gonna spoon-feed their tunes to you. Bands like Pink and Brown, Wolf Eyes and Hella make the kind of music that demands complete engrossment, utmost attention and thoughtfulness. There's no immediate love here — no manufactured hook to reel you in from the get-go. No, this takes time, immersion and appreciation — even some will and energy on the listener's end. It's all wacky, off-the-beaten-path, creating-on-the-cusp experimentation. What I think of as "What if? Land" music — you might even think of some of this as anti-music. It certainly offers an alternative to, well, everything.
You want your music to make you think, listen hard and careful, even get you a little lost? You got it with the 24 broken nonsensical, rule-disintegrating tracks on this 5RC comp that wishes the 21st Century didn't exist. Obviously the artists here would not only like to invent it for themselves, but also to invent the soundtrack for it. Or perhaps just pose the questions, "Don't we invent our own realities? Don't our realities define our existence, limit us with truths and rules? And aren't our truths and rules meant to be broken? Our boundaries pushed?"
The noisy, kooky sounds, bubbling and boiling over like the chemist's experiment gone terribly awry, seem plain evidence that rules were made to be broken. You'll find melancholy delivery on the verge of tears on Xiu Xiu's "Sad Cory-o-grapher," erratic post-punk on The Second's "Mommy Mommy Mommy" and VV and Hotel's (of The Kills) doing the super-distorted, grinding and spastic "Restaurant Blouse."
From the scary and spiraling minimalist metal of Orthrelm's "2nd 18 #13" to Quintron's sexy Prince-influenced, bass-heavy and electronically spacey "9-4-9" to Total Shutdown's growling, hardcore "Two," it's clear that 5RC artists dig numbers. Seriously, the variety is vast but the message seems to be clear: Fuck it up, and, in the words of that old wise man Jim Morrison, break on through.
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