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THE ORGAN

Here we go with The Smiths again -- this time in the form of five
young ladies from Vancouver. From the back of a dark club, after a few
beers, the lead singer could even kind of look like Morrissey -- albeit
a shorter, skinnier Morrissey with breasts.

Anyway, their obvious influences aside, they're quite good and they
look delightful in matching T-shirts. Bathed in red light, with some
perfectly post-modern videos playing behind them, they seem more Eastern
European than Left Coast of Canada -- like partying in communist Russia,
albeit with a female version of Morrissey. Aside from Broken Social
Scene, The Organ probably had the most advance hype coming into CMW, and
they handled themselves quite nicely, offering a much-needed break from
their garage-rock posturing of their male counterparts. A.W.

The Globe and Mail
Copyright (c) 2003 by The Globe and Mail

TABULAR OR GRAPHIC MATERIAL SET FORTH AT THIS POINT IS NOT DISPLAYABLE

Review Commentary

Thursday, February 27, 2003

By Carl Wilson
SCENE
The trauma lullabies of the new new wave

Dear Ellen: I'm not sure exactly when it was. Around the time you spent that long night on the phone with the gay boy who was holding the barrel of his father's rifle to his cheek? Or maybe it was after that other friend got kicked out of home and started moving through the new subdivisions, partying in empty prefab houses then moving on before construction was finished? Some days he even made it to class.

The details are wobbly, most of the witnesses vanished -- you'd think our high school had an omerta squad that would do the Sopranos proud, out erasing the trail. I only know that in the middle of the continuing emergency, which for most of us meant nothing worthwhile happening day after small-town day, at some point I noticed a bunch of kids suddenly listening to the Smiths.

Not you, not me -- we already had too many musical commitments. But it was as nearby as your pretty younger sister, her eyes disappearing behind layers of black goo, her torments, whatever they were, dressed up in a flattering khaki coat of anglophilic angst.

And we did join in the antifashions: We wore the big sweaters, with holes at the wrist for your thumbs, and the unisex liquid eyeliner (no small risk in those smugly intolerant Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney days) out to the rec-centre events where How Soon Is Now? moved us around the dance floor in our vague mixed-gender clumps, wondering what school all those better-looking kids came from and whether the metal heads would be waiting outside.

Lately it's occurred to me that the Smiths, the Cure, New Order, Psychedelic Furs, etc., were the original 'emo' -- a solipsistic soundtrack, like today's Dashboard Confessional or Jets to Brazil, for the hypersensitive kids to howl along, semi-soulfully, with words pitched at a level of pretension ideal for compulsive diarists and the bad-at-math. (The Smiths' lyrics were better, but their howling was worse.)

Did you know people are actually reviving that young-fogey branch of eighties music? New Music Express recently named the Smiths the most influential band of the past 30 years, and at Canadian Music Week in Toronto this weekend, sufferers include Montreal's the Dears (who are maturing out of it), Toronto's Stars (who turn it into smooth geometry) and Vancouver's the Organ , the Smithsiest of the lot.

But instead of the girly-man axis of singer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr, the Organ is composed of five young women, which you could say is the logical step. Singer Katie Sketch has said it was never her aim to be the new new wave, since she wasn't old enough to catch the first one. Unable to find experienced musicians who clicked, she and keyboardist Jenny Smyth decided to recruit friends instead, even if it meant teaching them to play. So the Organ's sound is just the one this particular group of people found they could make.

At its core is the extremely-non-eighties instrument the group is named for, Smyth's Hammond electric organ. On the band's debut EP, Hearts Sinking , Sketch warbles just the sort of thoughts that lure pubescent minds -- 'I am not surprised/ That I got my big head caught underneath the ice' or 'It really shook you when I said/ 'No one has ever looked so dead' ' -- while guitar riffs buzz, but Smyth is busy whirring away as if she were entertaining a skating rink in 1963.

The Organ's organ sounds like its stops are set randomly, and they're missing the Leslie amplifier, whose speaker horn rotates like a police siren and generates the erotic tremble heard in records by Booker T. and the MGs, James Brown, Like a Rolling Stone or in today's acid jazz. That all followed after the great Jimmy Smith hoisted the wood-and-wire behemoth out of the black church and into the hard-bop nightclub. In a way the Vancouver girls are bringing the Hammond back to the choir loft, where it can hum instead of wail. But all the hymns here are about not being able to have faith.

There's something otherworldly about the Hammond itself, invented by an Illinois clockmaker in 1934. 'Tone wheels' rotate inside it, driven by a small motor, playing electromagnetic waves like a violin bow against a string. It's got millions of tonal shades -- all in a way are blurs -- and practically infinite sustain. (Imagine sustaining something infinitely. You and I can't even manage to keep track of each others' addresses.)

Those little wheels remind me of Tibetan prayer wheels, one of the world's unlikeliest spiritual technologies -- give a clockwise spin to a cylinder with your mantra written on it, and you needn't bother chanting. The Hammond works with a similar earthy abstraction, its sweaty pleas all only invisible waves.

And that is what adolescence is like, especially the gap just after kissing and before everything else, which is what rock 'n' roll is mostly about. With the Organ, you aren't meant to hear all the lurching pedals and clicking keys that are integral to classic Hammond solos; it should envelop you in sound the way Marr's guitar did. Sketch's chilled, Blondie-like vocals help: There's a suave numbness, all minor keys but no blue notes, all meant to raise pain to view without ever letting it really hurt. They're like trauma lullabies.

Only under those conditions can you write a song like There Is Nothing I Can Do where Sketch sings about how 'it got back to me' that the crucial boy or girl had a tryst, and now she's lying in her room . . . cutting herself. That's the thin ice on this rink where the Organ plays, trying to melt through the surface to the underlying oceans or even just make it to a phone.

At least, that's how this music makes me recall it, Ellen. Do you, ever, now? I hope you, your husband and kids are well, wherever you are. I guess even then you were a bit above the fray.
The Dears are at the Phoenix tonight, Stars play the El Mocambo tomorrow, the Organ appears Saturday at the Horseshoe as part of Canadian Music Week. Details: www.cmw.net.
cwilson@globeandmail.ca

---- INDEX REFERENCES ----

KEYWORDS: pop music; review

ORGANIZATION: the Organ

EDITION: Metro

Word Count: 1090
02/27/2003 GLOBEMAIL R7
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