Austin Sound

No one is ever going to accuse Jad Fair of being straightforward throughout his decades long career. Even at his most accessible, Fair’s musical output is generally meandering, and convoluted, swerving from critical masterpiece to sunbaked dogshit. Half Monster, his third collaboration with Japanese noise maestro Naofumi Ishitaru (oddly enough making this album actually “Half Japanese”) is 45 tracks of dissonance, collage for the sake of collage, noise for insomniacs, and somewhere between relatively interesting and completely useless.

Some music is easy to describe. Half Monster is the exact opposite of both music and easy to describe. Scanning the track titles, one can’t help but appreciate the fact that Jad Fair is doing whatever his artistic whim is: “Godzilla Invades Mars”, “Drinking Machine”, “Santa’s Knee”, “Food – Pro And Con”.

Aliens is perhaps the most unique band in Austin, at least in terms of not quite fitting in with the “scene,” so it is somewhat ironic that Aliens and Misc. Music mastermind Blake Sandberg and I are sitting in the interview capital of the city - Spider House. Since moving to Austin from New York, Sandberg has started the Misc. Music label, which boasts such extraordinary and off kilter talents as Daniel Johnston, Jad Fair, and, of course, Aliens, who recently released their excellent debut LP, Head First. Crammed into a secluded booth in a corner of the coffee house, Sandberg shares his ideas on the nature of “genre labels,” the exclusivity of “the Austin sound,” radio commercials and, most importantly, Aliens.

Judging from a name like “Aliens” (not “The Aliens,” who are a cool Beta Band off-shoot, by the way) and a myspace genre list that reads “Punk / Rock / Techno,” my initial impression was that their take on Rock n’ Roll might be “out of this world” (read: “unlistenable”). On the contrary, the music, once I actually listened to it, is anything but. It’s an interesting mix between late 80’s radio-rock and simple punk riff-based songs. For a more in depth analysis, I had originally constructed a story detailing, in part, a spaceship flown by They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell who has thrown overboard the band’s unique instrumentation in order to achieve a near-lightspeed velocity fast enough to tear apart an unsuspecting spaceship piloted by R.E.M and built by Dinosaur Jr. with a daring kamikaze raid. Somewhere along the way, I realized I’d been watching Wing Commander far too often these days.