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by Alan di Perna
There's a vague threat in the dark way the bass line unfolds
beneath toxic kicks from a painfully distorted snare sample. The
rhythm is spare, its sonic spaces like blackened windows in a bad
neighborhood. Then comes this voice -- snarling, insinuating,
making Dennis Hopper's character in Blue Velvet seem like Mr.
Rogers. A nameless anxiety constricts your throat. You're waiting
for the Lightning Man to strike.
McCarthy was only 15 when Nitzer Ebb played their first gigs
in 1983. The following year, they released a single, "Isn't It
Funny How Your Body Works," on their own Power of Voice label. It
came out at a ticklish time. In '84, the industrial electronic
dance music ahd ceased to be a fad, but hadn't quite become an
established genre. "Some reviewer said we were two years too
late," Harris recalls with just a hint of acrimony.
"What Bon and I did for the album was make a list of genres --
styles that we wanted to steal," McCarthy says. "The list
literally ran through everything: '50s rock and roll, rock, rap,
jazz. And we structure the songs around our ideas or
interpretation of what each of those genres is like."
Their drum parts, though, are often entered into the sequencer
in real time, using Simmons pads. "We started doing it that way
on the last album, and we're gravitating toward it more and
more," says Harris. "You can spend a lot of time mucking around
programming, whereas if you just set up the pads, you can run
through the song for half a day and get a lot variations. Some of
the mistakes you make are better than anything you'd planned."
Not that Harris and McCarthy are exclusively into analog. The
calrinet and trumpet sounds on "Lightning Man," for instance, are
factory E-mu samples transferred to and played back on an Akai
S1000. "We had shied away from doing that in the past because
it's so obvious," Harris explains. "I mean, who doesn't use brass
samples on their records? But this was one case where the song
really dictated it. The track had this cheesy, gangster movie
feel, and we wanted to go whole hog with it. The horn samples
work well there because the basis of the track is so electronic,
but the whole atmosphere is not completely electronic."
For the past two albums, they've been aided in this process by
Flood, that producer with a single name but a multiplicity of
credits, including U2, Erasure, Cabaret Voltaire, and Nick Cave.
McCarthy praises Flood because he "can understand our musical
vocabulary, which involves saying 'thing' a lot, as in, 'This
track needs more of the wibbly thing, you know?'" Harris, for his
part, likes the way the producer "understands that thin line we
like to treat between the melodic and the atonal."
But will the masses -- particularly the American massess --
ever understand? Nitzer Ebb got a chance to test the waters last
year when they made their first visit to the States, opening for
Mute labelmates Depeche Mode. Their live show preserves the
stripped-nerve aggression they imbibed at early '80s Birthday
Party shows in London. There's lots of shouting and pounding on
drums. How did this sit with the Modes' teen pup audience?
"On the whole, they were either shocked into silence or jogged
into moving about," McCarthy responds. "We had a good feeling of
perversion -- that we were manipulating these kids' musical point
of view. Some of them are so young that these are the first
gigs they've gone to. So they haven't got that inbuilt thing of
having been perverted by the general music press or radio by
being told what is pop music and what isn't pop music, what is
listenable music and what isn't listenable music. So they don't
differentiate between us and Depeche Mode that much. They see us
just as bands. If they like us and they like Depeche Mode, then
we're a band just like Depeche Mode. From that point of view,
we're making quite good inroads with the young audience -- 13 and
14 or so."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
LESS CAN ROAR: NITZER EBB LIVE
With this setup Nitzer Ebb have all they need to shock the
house. "One of the things we've always had to fight against is
the notion that if you don't have a guitar, it's not a real
band," says McCarthy. "That's one reason why our show is so
energetic: to prove that you don't need guitarts to be a good,
exciting live band."
-- Alan di Perna
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