RECORD REVIEWS : The Swamp Zombies Grow Up, and Other Local Tales

This week’s roundup of local album releases focuses on a couple of bands that like to play things for laughs (Swamp Zombies and the Ziggens), one that plays everything fervently (the Prayer Chain), another that plays pure pop (the Tickets), and one that hasn’t played at all in more than 20 years (Jubal’s Children). The ratings system ranges from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.

** 1/2

Swamp Zombies

“A Frenzy of Music and Action!”

Doctor Dream

Action, indeed: This is the Swamp Zombies’ fourth album since 1988, making them the deans of Doctor Dream and the most prolific recording band on the Orange County rock scene over that period.

With its musical blend of folk, punk and garage rock, and an attitude that has room for snideness and good-natured fun, the foursome has always been a hoot live. But on record, the Swamp Zombies occasionally have come across as merely sophomoric, with some songs little more than inside jokes for the college-rock set.

“A Frenzy” finds the band maturing, giving a new, more thoughtful context to its old penchant for chronicling bizarre encounters. Musically, the Swamp Zombies have expanded their sound with such ‘60s garage-rock elements as fuzz-tone and rinky Farfisa organ. But they haven’t jettisoned their appealing scratch-and-clatter acoustic essence. In full flight, the Swamp Zombies call to mind a rickety go-cart that somehow manages to rocket across the finish line in winning shape.

“A Frenzy” has the rough makings of a concept album. It begins and ends with songs about psychotic killers; in between are tales that focus on escaping from the ordinary--not into horror, but into the magic of new experience.

“Since I’ve been unemployed, I’ve been reading books about mass murder,” Steve Jacobs deadpans in the opening “Unemployed.” On the next song, “Oddball,” the knowledge he’s gleaned about humanity’s dark side scares him into assuming the worst about a strange foreign fellow who may be a psycho--or a wonderful, hospitable guy. Jacobs’ character will never know for sure because he freaks and runs. The song serves as a metaphor for xenophobia and for the way in which our easily justified fears cut off our ability to embrace the unknown (we’ve all absorbed and been haunted by those stories “about mass murder”).

As the album goes on, the Swamp Zombies depict the rewards of shedding fears and seeking new experience. In “Damnedest Thing,” Jacobs gets to replay the encounter in “Oddball”; swallowing his fear this time, he follows a stranger through a doorway into wonder. “Puerto Angel,” with its slide guitars buzzing incessantly like flies that won’t go away, nicely evokes a long, hot, dusty bus ride through Mexico that ends in a payoff (evoked through luminous, sighing harmonies) worth the journey. “Johnny Quest,” the latest in a series of Swamp Zombies songs about kid stuff, symbolizes the need to tap into that imaginative, daydreaming-kid part of us. Musing about the fate of a cartoon hero, they ask: “Are you dead, or just hid in my head, Johnny Quest?”

Also included is the haunting lament “Before You Just Do It.” It’s one of the band’s best songs, turning on an unusual image: footwear as a symbol for the march of technology and the way in which rampant acquisitiveness steamrollers deeper values like natural beauty and “thou shalt not steal.”

The Swamp Zombies blow it in the end with “Ballad of Ed Gein,” an overlong, “Rawhide”-style Western narrative about the murderous loon who was the real-life model for Hitchcock’s Norman Bates. Instead of summing up poignantly or provocatively the theme of fear-versus-adventure that they’ve developed, the Swamp Zombies opt for unimaginative sensationalism that also provides a too-easy bookend symmetry with “Unemployed.”

So a few sophomoric tendencies remain. But this album takes a big step toward outgrowing them.

** 1/2

The Prayer Chain

“Neverland Sessions”

Chatterbox Records

To be flippant about it, this is an album about a boy and his God. Every so often, the Prayer Chain (a band that is anything but flippant) allows some other (very troubled) human beings into the picture. But these Christian rockers mainly operate in that very private realm described by Jewish theologian Martin Buber, where the human I strives to touch the eternal Thou .

That sort of spiritual striving is what a good deal of the early U2 was about, and it comes as little surprise that the Prayer Chain sounds a lot like the early U2. In lieu of “I Will Follow,” band members Tim Taber, Andy Prickett, Eric Campuzano and Wayne Everett give us “Follow This” and “Follow Me.” But what’s impressive here is that the Prayer Chain musters enough honed force and passion to make you forget how derivative their music is of U2 and a few other British sources who rely on a grand, surging wave-of-sound.

Far from bland, chirpy, praise-the-Lord stuff, this is Christian rock with a burdened conscience. On the gracefully brooding “(You Could) Take It Away,” singer Taber first tries to bribe God with promises, then, realizing that bribes won’t work, sings abashedly about his own unworthiness of divine consideration--and his wonder at the realization that he receives it anyway.

“Whirlwind,” one of two departures into the worldly, depicts a violent daddy terrorizing mom and the kids. What could have been a rote portrait of a typical modern-day demon gains depth from its linkage to the next track, “Follow Me,” wherein a man consumed with rage begs God to change him.

“Some Love” is the other song here concerned with observable human behavior rather than intimate communication with the divine (for the most part, this album is a chain of prayers). It portrays three people who come to church seeking acceptance and spiritual sustenance--a newly divorced woman, a homosexual and a woman who has just had an abortion--only to be preached at or have confidences betrayed by the smug moralists who are in control. Storming against hypocrisy in our religious institutions, Taber urges: “We better find some love, or we’re never gonna see them again.”

With its single-minded central theme, its one basic style, and its unvarying, clenched mode of performance, the Prayer Chain is awfully limited despite the strong musicianship of this debut CD. While the band might argue that no theme matters more, one hopes that in the future it will look more toward the worldly concerns (and joys) that underlie spiritual life. Loosen up a bit, find new musical sources and emotional colors, and bite off life-size chunks of experience rather than questing after ultimate truth at every turn. Of course, U2 never followed the above advice, and look where it got them.

** 1/2

Jubal’s Children

“Well Done”

Swak

This charming period piece is no great artistic achievement, but it offers the enjoyment of revisiting an innocent time. The time in question is 1968-69, when this obscure Orange County band set down the tracks compiled here (Jubal’s Children member Tracy Sands, who played bass, piano and lead guitar, now runs a small custom label; this cassette release is part of his ongoing attempt to dredge up lost or never-released music from the unsung Orange County rock scene of the mid to late ‘60s).

The album opens with the stilted, self-conscious absurdism of “We’re Not What We Are,” a bit of psychedelia that trippily follows Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and the Buffalo Springfield-era Neil Young of “Mr. Soul.” Next comes the most memorable song, “Doormat.” With a subdued melancholia that echoes Young’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” the tune finds singer-songwriter Robert Wahlsteen (stage name, Bob Chance) luxuriating in, justifying, and ultimately celebrating his own maudlin self-pity as a mark of the super-sensitivity much valued circa 1969. (A time when sensitivity-unto-wimpishness could be celebrated must have been superior to today’s lean-and-mean ethic.)

The rest of the album is given mainly to sentimental, soft-rock crooning--with a touch of Lovin’ Spoonful and a bit of Nilsson and Oliver in the mix. It’s utter treacle but always competently performed. Jubal’s Children was the equal of any number of sincere-but-ultimately-silly pop bands that flickered on the charts during its time; if the band had gotten its break, it might well have become known for the sort of lovably disposable stuff that surfaced on Rhino’s “Have a Nice Day” collection of pop nonsense from the ‘70s.

** 1/2

The Ziggens

“Wake Up and Smell . . . The Ziggens”

Like Socrates and Sam Cooke, the Ziggens have the wisdom on this self-financed debut cassette to concede that they don’t know much. Therefore, they don’t try to say more than they know. Instead, the Ziggens spend this unassuming album diverting themselves with lyrical non sequiturs, deliberately dopey rhymes, and the fun of knocking around with a surfy guitar style, some thrashy garage-rock sounds and a comical country twang.

“I might be a little confused / I might be a little amused,” Bert Susanka, the band’s singer-guitarist and main songwriter, admits on “I’m Not Afraid,” the album’s one semi-coherent expression of a philosophy. Susanka, who gets a reedy, Paul Simon hang-dog folkie cast in his voice on more introspective numbers (and emits respectable yowls on the raucous ones), allows that there might be a key to the secret of life but that it’s beyond his reach: “I know God’s got a job for each of us to do / He just ain’t givin’ us no uniforms yet, but that’s something he might do.”

Sources include Camper Van Beethoven’s Balkan polka-beat slant and the Velvet Underground’s milder, airy-pop side. There are playful, out-of-the-blue allusions to a dead rock idol (Jim Morrison), a dead basketball coach (Adolph Rupp) and a lively rock band (NRBQ). Some songs recall the cute, childlike whimsicality of Jonathan Richman or Eggplant’s Jeff Beals, but the Ziggens don’t work hard enough to use whimsy to make a point about everyday experience.

Still, there is a sense of poignancy underlying songs like “Furball” and “Tim the Dinosaur,” two songs that could be the musings of a sad, lonely guy trying to cheer himself up with childlike fantasies. And, as they put it in “Furball,” the Ziggens don’t require that we pay attention: “If you think this song is sickeningly sweet / Just ignore the words and dig my crazy beat.”

They back it up with scrappy, unpretentious playing (recorded live in the studio), on-target harmonies, and the occasional surprisingly strong rock-out--”Tidal Wave,” for instance, is the sort of punked-up modern surf music that the Pixies love to dabble in.

** 1/2

The Tickets

“Make a Record”

The pleasures on this self-made cassette are all on the surface, but it’s a surface that any pure-pop fan should find alluring. Basically, the Tickets play glistening, sumptuously melodic takeoffs on bands that made their living doing takeoffs on the Beatles. There are strong echoes of Badfinger and Squeeze, a touch of Elvis Costello, a fine, chiming Byrds tribute, and two rockabilly-tinged numbers recalling Rockpile and Marshall Crenshaw.

However, there isn’t much emotional resonance to the Tickets’ accounts of love gone bad, and the band fails to apply a twist of originality to its classy sources.

The cassette illustrates a hazard faced by bands that, like the Tickets, make a living on the cover-club circuit. While musicianship flourishes from nightly practice (Paul McCartney himself might admire the full, loping punch in the bass on “I Don’t Belong”), it becomes difficult to cultivate an inner voice of one’s own while churning out replicas of somebody else’s art. The Tickets probably could play circles around 3D Picnic, one of the best pure-pop bands on the local all-originals circuit, but 3D’s songs communicate more strongly because they have a depth and quirky dimension that’s absent from “Make a Record.” Still, pure-pop pleasure is pure-pop pleasure, and on this record it never lets up.