The Tender Nihilism of The Geraldine Fibbers
Attention grabbing opening lines; country music for extraterrestrials; transmissions to and from the afterlife; sedated schizoid ballads...
Philophobia – an album released by Arab Strap in 1998 – announces itself to a world that has been hidden from view behind drawn curtains, in a half-awake and hungover Scottish accent, setting the scene for the pervasive misery that is to follow: A dismal parade of songs on a par with persistent rain, bedded into leaden skies, drubbing against the leaking seams of a bedroom window in a grimy tower block; tales of relationships that have been chipped out of bounds and come to rest deep in the weeds. In so far as grabbing the wavering focus of a listener is concerned, “it was the biggest cock you'd ever seen...” takes some beating as an opening line.
“A ball of light comes down to bite me on the ass” might not be quite as attention-grabbing, but it is certainly in the same ballpark: California Tuffy sets up an opening triumvirate of sexual dysfunction that overshadows the first quarter of Butch – the second and final album from The Geraldine Fibbers; a band who emerged from L.A. in 1994 and burned briefly and brightly prior to splitting in 1997.
A four-line, blow by blow account of a female orgasm – the momentary loss of equilibrium, the elation and the self loathing and the dripping aftermath – is a bold beginning: This is immediately followed by a drawn-out, galloping crescendo of grinding electric guitar and flagging drums, rooted in place and yet writhing on the spot for all it's worth. It is only at the end of the chorus that the song has its jubilant swagger kicked out from under it and shows its true colours, as the bi-polar monologue of a young woman who has withdrawn from the world into cycles of self pleasure:
“I'll be alone forever you'll never get my heart.”
It’s a sentiment at odds with the optimism of the music, which is sloppy, happy-go-lucky surf punk, hastened along by a quick back and forward skip of the drums, upwinding sinews of violin, a blossom shower of notes fluttering from between the strings of a mandolin, the occasional yodelled word creeping in.
A recurring theme across the album is that of low expectations either going unfulfilled or otherwise being granted with the ironic malevolence of a genie in a bad mood. Toybox is a twisting ribbon of rage that arrives ready to boil over. Vocalist, Carla Bozulich's request to her father for a quarter yields “25 cents and a kiss for good luck” – the same value in coin though perhaps it seems like less when delivered as a fistful of copper. The kiss, delivered as an afterthought, carries no worth.
The song simmers briefly to allow room for a spoken-word prelude, before staggering into an atonal lurch that eventually flourishes into a screamed chorus – the raw fury of someone who has recently come to realise that they have been failed by the world. At the unravelling apex, a fraying string section and a guitar squall briefly go head to head. It's a car crash of ugly music meeting ugly words; one crushed against the other: There is another bold opening line: “My shell on top of your knotty fist with a speculum shoved up my cunt, after hours”. Is it about under-age prostitution, backstreet abortion, a child's hopes and dreams ceding to a squalid teenage reality? Perhaps it is all of the above.
Following some hesitant snatches of broken guitar chords, I Killed The Cuckoo settles into head-down forward momentum – an unregulated junk-yard mechanism where Bozulich's staccato vocals share percussive duties with the drums. Occasionally it comes to a dead stop. Again there is the nihilism – the predilection towards self-annihilation, surfacing in a chorus that amelodically veers off the rails, threatening to drag the rest of the song along with it:
“Doesn't her smile smack of starvation Her legs outstretched towards her salvation In a word it's suicide like everything else.”
After these three tracks have cleared the decks of any casual listeners, the album is never again quite as nasty or as abrasive, though it remains deeply odd. Whatever style the band throw their weight behind – street punk, cornball country, avant-garde Eastern European chamber music – is dragged past southern gothic and into the backwoods. Even the sole cover version – an unlikely run through You Doo Right (originally by the German motorik group – Can) isn't entirely spared this treatment, though it remains, by far, the most optimistic moment on the record, with the band throwing in everything bar the kitchen sink, Bozulich smouldering in one line, then yelping the next, up until the point where it collapses into jigsaw pieces of feedback.
There are two straight country songs. Folks Like Me is a sorrowful dear john from a woman reluctantly preparing to leave her lover and return to her own kin. The knee-jerk response to the hokey rural overtones, the Grand Ole Opry canter and the violin and steel guitar wheeling around each other in the background, is to imagine that the 'folks' in question are of the inbred, uni-browed variety, come down from the mountain to reclaim one of their own. Line such as “there's just no word for this where I come from”, “I told you from the start that I was not what I appeared” and “my work here was simple till I met you”, all point to origins further afield – extraterrestrial or even celestial.
It is a similar story on Pet Angel – a fingerpicked, fiddle-grazed country waltz wrapped around a hazy narrative that makes passing mention of “ol' bill, the man with the porcupine face”, and ends with a body in the river and a plea from the murderer to Jesus to take care of the soul of their victim.
That these two songs are presented back to back is characteristic of an album that, beneath the surface-level anarchy, has been painstakingly and logically pieced together from its many warped elements. This orderly construction extends to the track-listing where like is placed alongside like, or where there is some other practical reasoning behind the sequence; by way of example, the two instrumentals that are set at track 7 and track 14, where they function as wordless codas for the two halves of the album. Of these, the country music in the doldrums of Claudine is the slightly more interesting, with its drabbed-down fairground organ spiked with splinters of steel guitar.
Similarly, Trashman In Furs and Swim Back To Me, as transmissions to and from the afterlife, are paired with each other. The latter laments a drowned lover. The former (my favourite song on the album) sees the disembodied spirit of Bozulich racing through the sky, in the aftermath of an unspecified accident, to whisper a message into her lover's morphine drip. By the end of the song, the chorus, that is nudged along by hand-cranked cello, has broken down into disparate lines, leaving you to wonder whether she made it, or faded away on the journey.
There is something strangely literary about the way the band go about composing: Many of the songs on Butch have either instrumental overtures, or spoken or sung preludes. The title track opens like a piece of gypsy theatre, the violin thereafter contorting into thorny coils around a tortured lament of unrequited love. The baroque Apple To My Drunken Eye that follows after feels like an afterword.
As partings go, The Dwarf Song is about as upbeat as you could expect, like someone has gathered the broken pieces of their psyche and arranged them into a private anthem. The verses are filled with fairytale, Avalonian imagery that hints at medical sedation. The chorus – “I found a reason to live today” – which is laid down upon a succession of subdued drum rolls, at one point ominously stops, before the song picks itself back up. I like to imagine it as a successor to Lilybelle, which opened the band's first album (Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home) and which finds the titular subject rocking “not to records, but to voices in her head.” Maybe this is the same girl having finally achieved compromised peace of mind.
I never saw The Geraldine Fibbers live though I get the impression that, on a good night, they were probably very memorable. They certainly managed to get some live energy down on tape. Despite being signed to Virgin, they never gained a foothold. Dragon Lady, from their first album, reached 173 in the UK single charts. I recall reviewers of Butch expressing bafflement, which is the reason why I sought it out – exactly my kind of record. Part of the problem with a band who is this in your face, is that it is easy to accept the noise and the ferocity as the be-all-and-end-all and not look any deeper. Underlying the surface-level chaos and idiosyncrasies of this record there is great nuance and depth. Carla Bozulich may have raged at an unfair world but she had something to shout about.
Dear Sam,
I've been reading your mag since #1, and I think it's just tops! I loved the issue where you fight the dragon, the one where you banished Torture Tortoise to the No-Dimension, and the evocative, emotionally devastating descriptions of your bus trip from West Badminton to Chumberley-On-Rice.
I was wondering if you could help me with a school assignment. Do you know of any songs whose lyrics can easily be rewritten so that the singer is telling the audience not to wash their ass? So far I've got:
Pavement - Cut Your Hair ("Darlin' don't you go and wash your ass")
The Rolling Stones - Out of Time ("Baby, baby, baby, don't wash your ass")
Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time ("Don't you ever wash your ass") <--- not sure about this one, I'd prefer if she wasn't so demanding about it
Songs where the singers themselves proudly declare not washing their asses also work. Recently, I've been listening to a new song by Swiss band Bonaparte called "Not Giving a Fuck" and found myself quite moved by this simple conversion:
"Everything's starting to make sense
'Cause I stopped washing my ass
Everything is starting to come together
'Cause I'm not washing my ass"
If you can help, I'll be so grateful that I'll stop reading your mag at read-komik.ru and start paying the 5 cent cover price.
Keep up the good work!
Timmy "Little Tony" Thompson-Estrada
Age 1
Green Haven Correctional Facility
594 Rt. 216. Stormville, NY 12582-0010
OKAY TO PRINT