What a difference a couple of years makes. In 2004, the Black Swans caught
our attention with the luminously beautiful, dark folk of Who Will Walk
in the Darkness With You. Ruminative, melancholy, shot through with
wild swoops of violin and glowing guitar, it was an album charged with
longing, the fear of death, the hope for connection with others.
Sex
Brain is a whole other animal, more rock than folk, more about
consummation than desire. Whereas a couple of years ago, the boys in the
Black Swans were walking around heartbroken in the dark, now they're having
a post-coital cigarette. Before, they had rocks in their shoes weighting
them down; now they have fingers between female legs and girls hopped up on
tequila pulling their pants down. Well, OK, good for them.
As before, the band's core is still singer/guitar player Jerry DeSicca
and violinist Noel Sayre. The rest of the band is new with this album —
Canaan Faulkner on bass and accordion, Chris Forbes on electric guitar and
Keith Hanlon on drums — and they bring a volume and pop orientation that
wasn't apparent on the earlier album. "I.D.W.2 F." opens the disc, with a
more driving, electrified sound than before. The instrumentation feels
denser, with the jangle of guitars and the surge of accordion under
DeSicca's silky voice. Sayre's violin, always an interesting element in
the Black Swans mix, is barely apparent, and there's a chaotic,
feedback-laced coda to the song. It sounds like a different band,
musically, and it brings the EP's sexual content straight to the
foreground. In fact, the song's title is an abbreviation of its first
line, "I don't want to fuck" — an odd opening for a record that is all about
exactly that. "Friends," which follows, is more in line with the Black
Swans' older sound, with a slow drone of violin rising amid trembling
guitar notes. It sounds like a love song, slow and aching with feeling,
yet its subject is the liberating power of tequila. "Tequila, my
friend/ Inhibitions end with you/ Always end," DeSicca whispers, toward the
end of the track, which is gorgeous and far more serious musically than its
throwaway lyrics would suggest.
"Your Hands" is also quite lovely, a much-needed alt-folk addition to a
select catalog of songs about masturbation. (Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict,"
Divinyls' "I Touch Myself," Jackson Brown's "Rosie" — you can probably think
of some others.) Sayre's violin work is particularly fine here, billowing
in the slow crevices between verse and chorus, and there's a stately heft
to the brush-on-snares percussion. The song is really about memory, loss
and desire, not just jerking off. Even so it's still got a creepy, sort of
too-much-information quality to it, especially the last verse. ("We're
together forever/ Like little hairs you can't see/ And as you're with
someone
else/ You're still pleasing me.")
The most interesting song on the EP is "Dark Plum," which erupts out of a
dirge of discordant feedback, a primal ooze of sorts comprised of wheeling
violin figures, the crash of cymbals and long-held guitar notes. It's a
wonderful drone, overlapping and sometimes overwhelming the vocals, feeling
both traditional and wild at the same time. It's also the song that's most
closely aligned with rejection... maybe you just can't write at your best
when you're getting laid regularly. Closer "My Lips" is tamer and more
pop, a well-kept garden after the tangled chaos of "Dark Plum." There are some
pretty harmonies, courtesy of guest singer Sara Jurcyk, and some lyrics
about various sex acts slipped into the folk-structured verses.
I found myself enjoying the music on Sex Brain best when I wasn't
listening to the lyrics very closely. Pay too much attention and this
album becomes like sitting in one of those crowded NYC restaurants where
people at neighboring tables are discussing the most personal aspects of
their lives at top volume. Sure you might get a little voyeuristic charge
out of it, but don't you feel kind of dirty after?
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