Many musicians (and their labels) are trying to bolster their slumping physical sales by providing as many additional features and combination choices as possible, including bonus material, bonus DVDs, bonus MP3s, and bonus books (see U2’s latest marketing strategy to get an extreme example). While I can appreciate having the extra features for bands that really matter to me, I’m often quite cynical about the whole ploy and don’t bother buying any such bonus combinations for the escalated price. The reason I mention this tactic is so that I can contrast this sterile face of the marketing machine with that of the truly innovative independent scene. And my main example will be London band Morton Valence, composed of Robert Hacker Jessett, Anne Gilpin, Leo Fernandez, Camilo Parra, and Alejo Pelaez. I became aware of them via Anne Gilpin who was also part of Vanilla Swingers, the band who created my top album of 2008. Not only did Morton Valence join the likes of Patrick Wolf and frYars in opening up the funding of their record, Bob and Veronica Ride Again, to fans, but they created not only a record, but an experience. This experience extends to a soft cover book nestled next to the CD and several live “book club” performances, which all comment on and complement each other. The rather ordinary narrative of two potential lovers, Bob Young and Veronica Wilson, becomes extraordinary and three-dimensional and completely surreal in its reality.
The accompanying book begins with a quote from Syd Barrett: “Fairy-tales are nice.” It’s the fitting beginning and summary for a story that keeps itself brief in one-sentence paragraphs, yet at the same time, it foreshadows a happy ending – a happy ending that you’re not quite sure about until you get there, and even then, you’re not sure how it happened. But you find it quite nice in the end. You are plunged into the mundane life of Bob Young, who sees Veronica for the first time while trying to get a job. Through coincidence or fate, depending on how romantic your viewpoint is, Bob meets up with Veronica again, only to discover she’s an evangelical Christian. Despite several botched attempts at winning her heart, or at the very least her body, it seems Veronica, who is as humanly complicated as Bob, is still drawn to him. In spite of herself and in spite of life itself. Even Morton Valence make an appearance themselves as a “raucous hi-energy disco wedding band” in a club that Bob and Veronica are cajoled into going to by Bob’s junkie friend, Zak. The climax of the novella, and perhaps its crux, occurs when Veronica comes over to Bob’s flat for dinner. Their conversation ends up here:
‘Science doesn’t own the truth Bob.’
‘Neither does Jesus.’
‘Ok, but why should everything have to be proven or disproven? I have faith, as have the vast majority of humanity since the beginning of time, having faith is part of what makes us human, having faith is believing in something that cannot be proven, believing in love is a type of faith, how can you prove love? You can’t, but most of us know it exists as we’ve felt it at some point in our lives, just being able to trust and love something far greater than yourself, not something you can necessarily touch and see that needs to be proven and quantified by some egg-headed scientist in a laboratory.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what happens when people lose faith?’ she asked.
‘Errr…dunno, tell me…?’
‘Their lives become empty, suspicion and anger come in to fill the void and they lose their humanity.’
After this rather informal dialogue about big philosophical questions, things take a rather absurd turn. An LSD-laced teapot hijacks the story for three rather psychedelic, paranoid chapters fillled with a skipping Van Morrison record and a swirling Van Gogh painting. The moment is both comic and tragic as Bob loses his reality and Veronica at the same time. However, in the muddle and the loss, Bob seems to step outside of his passive existence and to take charge of his reality from a decidedly new angle, culminating in that fairy-tale ending.
The album retains a lot of the ambiguity of the novella, and the band has the retro cool confidence and sweet pop of Saint Etienne. The record begins in media res, as does life itself, and amidst the general chatter, banging piano and crowd noises, a short song called Veronica’s Revenge (Continued) emerges. Gilpin sweetly sings that she would like “some souvenir of all the things we did” before the track starts skipping, a fantastic connection to the skipping record portion of the book. It is here that we seem to be launched back in time into a picaresque adventure, where each song becomes a fanciful episode. Chandelier, which I featured a few weeks back in my weekly mix for London artists, is a mesmerizing dream of a song with its enchanting xylophone and interchange of vocals between Gilpin and Jessett. It spirals through a haze of first date emotions before fading into light ballroom music, evoking the silly euphoria of first loves and lusts and the state of a mind drugged by endorphin overload. As much as the couple wants to “swing from the chandelier,” they want to hang onto these crystal feelings and the electric moment. Then Jesus and Mary Chain guitars buzz through the beginning of Sequin Smile while Gilpin’s lush vocals “pay homage to the goddess of the stairs.” The song’s title could be a reference to Veronica’s “silvery smile” as described in the novella. A gentle, pulsing cabaret feel enters the soundscape with Ordinary Pleasures, which reminds me of Black Box Recorder lambasting the ordinary and showing that it isn’t all that normal after all. Tambourine and laconic bass back Bob’s attempt to “unfurl” Veronica’s life even as the walls of the room start to curl in some meltdown of reality. As Ordinary Pleasures fades away in a wash of mysterious feedback and sirens, Funny Peculiar sidles in with pumping synthesizers and trippy electropop a la Pulp. The first lines are “We like to boogie/all night dancing/feel the world spinning round/while everything is so funky” before they start mentioning the people that “sing hallelujah” and how “they’ll make you laugh then disappoint you,” two points that remind me of the part in the novella where Bob attends an evangelical service to get closer to Veronica. The point at which Jessett starts singing “Let it rain all over me,” his vocals continue to echo an overwrought evangelical chorus while Gilpin’s cartoony “bah bah’s” add a frivolous, comic sense to the whole predicament.
The carnivalesque drifts into the rather bluesy, dark John Young, which slinks along behind Gilpin’s old-time siren-style vocals. The chorus takes on some Old West flourishes, prompting me to think that the maverick hero that the song is named after is what Bob and Veronica both wish Bob were. Or what they both can imagine him to be if they try hard enough. Despite the fact “their love is average” and “their treachery is pure,” the duo seems like play actors in a world of their own creation as the outside world threatens to spill in through more chatter by the end of the song. Cracks of thunder and synth chords signal the next track, Hang It On the Wall, which sees Jessett taking over slightly desperate, despairing vocals. The character, Bob, seems to beg for a way to forget their flaws and the cracks in their relationship by hanging a pretty picture over it; this song makes a clever tie-in with the fact that a painting of Gilpin and Jessett is featured as the cover art for both CD and novella. The song ends in a tannoy solo by Jessett.
The album takes a calmer, subdued corner with Nobody Understands. Gilpin’s hushed vocals are backed by minimal music that occasionally swells into a choir-like crescendo. Veronica’s inner turmoil and confusion over a wounded past is brilliantly displayed in the lyrics “They won’t hurt you/unless they have to/but they don’t really mean to.” Filled with pregnant pauses, the song culminates in a beautifully frail, small “me” after several repetitions of “nobody understands.” Sweet pop and xylophone return with Falling Down the Stairs, which provides a new wave sound for yet another metaphor of love: falling down the stairs. Gilpin’s vocals continue their perfect understatement as she asks that you “listen to my story.” Bob, Veronica and Some Crickets indeed feature cricket sounds along with more xylophone and disorienting, reverby vocals from both Gilpin and Jessett. Recounting such regular details of life as double-decker buses and fruit machines, the song also uses some less than typical comparisons for the lovers, including a pillow, a wineglass, sand and footprints. As the speeding heartbeat of the previous song fades away, a Spectorish beat and organ come in for “I Must Go” She Said, “But I Will Al…, a song that lulls you with calming vocals from both Jessett and Gilpin. Both characters are certain of the fact they will leave other, but are equally as certain that they will return. The song bursts into whizzes and fuzzy guitars after a trumpet solo, interrupting the suggestive moment of the earlier half and emulating the unfinished title. After a very brief interlude called Disco, which features as more of a sound effect and setting device than anything else with its garbled crowd noises, the tender Go to Sleep concludes the record’s story. The acoustic ballad becomes Veronica’s lullaby as she lightly croons, “hush now/fly on home.” It’s as though all that came before this was a waking dream, and the “kiss, don’t say goodnight” refrain from Chandelier takes on new meaning.
Since I ordered my copy of Bob and Veronica Ride Again, I’ve been getting e-news from the band, including invitations to “Bob & Veronica’s Book Club” at which Morton Valence play the record in its entirety. If you’re in London on July 9, they’re doing another rendition aboard the Battersea Barge on the Thames. These kinds of performances take the concept of a gig into far more creative territory, much the same way the album/novella stretch the idea of both artforms, and contribute to creating a full experience rather than single pieces of art. By refusing the temptation to have a parallel narrative running in both novella and record, the story becomes richer as the two forms of media present a different way into the same emotions. Morton Valence has managed to decant the messy dregs of life, love, and lust into a sweet, heady cocktail that provides lucidity through madness. Life is a funny, sad narrative populated by thousands of Bobs and Veronicas, who are all painting pretty pictures and falling down stairs…and hoping that their broken lives and unfinished sentences end in fairy tales.
Morton Valence’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/mortonvalence
CONDEMNED TO ROCK 'N ROLL 
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