ALTERNATIVE PRESS
DECEMBER 1993
IDAHO
Year
After Year
In
my review of their EP The Palms (AP # 64) I compared
Idaho to Red House Painters, Codeine and Leonard Cohen because, like those
artists’ subtly somber music, Idaho’s will, I predict, withstand the ravages of
trends and time. Idaho slowly trek through the outer
dark of their scarred psyches to produce songs sadder than a custodian in a
porn theater. If Year After Year were a person it
would be prescribed Prozac and advised to seek psychotherapy.
John
Berry (guitar/drums) is a veteran of the LA. punk
scene, an ex-heroin addict and ex-con. Jeff Martin (bass/vox),
poor soul, endured three weeks as music composition major in a California
college. I shudder to contemplate exactly what these guys went through to
create music this harrowing.
Frankly,
Year After Year is monochrome but not monotonous. It’s essentially twelve variations
on a theme—but it’s a hell of a theme: simple, desolate acoustic guitar strum
underpinning eerie wailing feedback and slo-mo power-chords,
over which Martin sings in his plaintively Cohenesque
voice. Berry uses feedback the way Alberto Giacometti
sculpts: severely lean, disturbingly beautiful.
The
opening “God’s Green Earth” sets the tone that follows for most of Year After
Year. In this tenebrous ballad, a beatific calm battles an inner turmoil,
resulting in a delicious tension. “Skyscrape,”
a stone-cold classic, pulses and flows like My Bloody Valentine’s sultry sonic sedative
“Swallow,” of all things. It conjures that hollowed-out yet somehow
relieved feeling that can come after a relationship goes bust. Slight
deviations from the norm occur on “Here to Go,” a power ballad with slate-gray
guitar crescendos and controlled valve tube explosions, and “One Sunday,” which
is almost jaunty and in a brighter modality than anything else here; it’s Idaho’s “Lord Kill the Pain” (see Red House
Painters’ Down Colorful Hilt). “Endgame,” actually a retitled,
post-trauma version of the awesome “You Are There” from The Palms, appropriately
closes the LP with a stormy bang.
I can’t imagine that the
Beavis and Butthead generation will cotton to Idaho’s mature, measured angst
ballads but sensitive, intelligent individuals will fall hard for Year After
Year. (Caroline)
-Dave Segal