Led by noted musician-thinker Ian Svenonius, Chain and the Gang’s current lineup features two new members in bassist Anna Nasty and guitarist Francy Z Graham, as Mark Cisneros lends a hand on drums. They have a full-length on the horizon, but right now the focus is on Best of Crime Rock, which finds the revamped unit dishing out fresh versions of some of the outfit’s well-loved tunes. Bluntly put, few have the chutzpah to attempt such a maneuver, but Chain and the Gang pull it off and with panache to burn. Holding two new tracks amid the dozen offerings, it’s available now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through In the Red Records.
A band endeavoring to rerecord their hits for a Best of set is aptly pegged as a dicey exercise, but from this writer’s perspective Ian Svenonius, high of profile as frontman of The Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War, and now Chain and the Gang, has an impressive track record of turning iffy propositions into resounding success.
Svenonius’ musical activities are always conceptual, and to anybody acquainted with his writings, recordings, and indeed just his public persona, this should be crystal clear. But for those unfamiliar, please don’t get the wrong idea. When the term conceptual is applied to music, it can be difficult to suppress an assortment of fears, prominent amongst them bone-dry slogs, ludicrousness bred from unchecked indulgence, and of course varying degrees of arrogance.
Thankfully, Svenonius’ work is none of those things, in part because he combines economy and intelligibility with doses of sharp, smart humor, attributes gleaned from the punk aesthetic that’s at the core of his art. Just as importantly, throughout his discography is found an unflagging attraction to the lowercase disposability of rock ‘n’ roll.
The crispness of the man’s message directly relates to the Best of and Greatest Hits LPs that serve as the model for Best of Crime Rock, though this statement requires a bit of finetuning; over the decades, Best and Greatest albums have shouldered their share of disdain, and much of it fully deserved, but in the early days, when a significant percentage of R&R recordings were found in department stores, they served the useful function of returning to availability tunes that had long vacated the singles racks.
Flash forward to 2017 and Chain and the Gang’s output is relatively easily to hear, though this doesn’t negate the worthiness of the band’s latest. This slate of inspired new versions marks the fifth entry in the catalog, and as stated up top, another LP (to be titled Experimental Music) is on the way, making this evolving group Svenonius’ most enduring project since The Make-Up.
But Best of Crime Rock shakes free of the self-congratulation and strained nostalgia that has come to afflict the Best of scenario, partly through non-ostentatious remodeling that’s far more practical than one might initially think; for anyone planning on catching an upcoming Chain and the Gang live show, this is what the old stuff is going to sound like.
And sound is important. For too many conceptualists, their results end up being almost an afterthought, but Svenonius’ cares passionately for the listenability of his bands; in fact, this might be his greatest strength. And with a couple of one-off exceptions, it’s always bands with the guy, which underlines a general consistency in his oeuvre, a standard covering both themes and overall quality.
This makes Best of Crime Rock worth the effort, enough so that it could easily function as an intro for Chain and the Gang rookies. Along with those two new ones, it pulls three from ’09 debut Down with Liberty…Up with Chains!, two from ’11’s Music’s Not for Everyone, three from ’12’s In Cool Blood, and two from ’14’s Minimum Rock and Roll.
They begin with the song that opened their last one, but as said, those were different times. Where the first take of “Devitalize” radiated a drum-box punk vibe, here the thrust gets substantially beefed up in the rhythm section as Svenonius’ sneer inches closer to Richard Hell, which for an anti-gentrification screed is wholly appropriate.
The album closes with bold update of “Deathbed Confession.” The version from ’09 combined a ’60s garage-pop approach with recited text evoking an ill-attended Tuesday night poetry reading from somewhere in the bowels of 1990 (this is not a putdown). The remaking finds Svenonius’ conspiratorial fiction unchanged, but the mood surrounding it significantly darker.
A handful of standouts arise between these bookends, including “Certain Kinds of Trash,” the new one larger yet even more soulfully lithe than the first, a transformation that’s even bigger (and fittingly so) in “I See Progress.” In emphasizing the work-song foundation of “What is a Dollar?” the garage angle of the original gets lessened, but in reducing the post-Diddley Nuggets-ism of “Why Not?” it appealingly morphs into post-punk pulse and stomp.
Svenonius’ takes over the lead vocal in “Free Will,” and although the playing is more adept, brighter, and thicker, the song is largely the same, a scenario that also fruitfully shapes Best of Crime Rock’s readings of “’Nuff Said” and “Mum’s the Word.” While “Livin’ Rough” also follows this template, the anemic basement-punk dance groove found on Music’s Not for Everyone is given a significant boost.
Again, the gist here is suitable for newbies and subtle enough to satisfy the fans. Of the new cuts, “The Logic of Night” is an organ drenched soul-punk singalong, and “Come Over” is the closest I’ve heard Svenonius get to power-pop, an unexpected twist helping to solidify Best of Crime Rock as a must have for his fanbase. Chain and the Gang has always been a band, but they’ve never sounded more so than they do right here.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
