A-morph Review

 by Michael Hamad, Creative Loafing


"I’ve been putting off writing about this new collection of songs because I’ve become an unrepentant fan. I first met drummer/vocalist Jonas Canales a couple of years ago at a gig my band played with his former band. I later spoke at length with him and guitarist/singer Katherine Kelly a little over a year ago when they had just completed their first album,  Warriors of the Light, a debut that earned all kinds of praise from critics around the Bay area (myself included). Recently, when Kelly sent me their new album, A-Morph, I wanted to like it, and that’s not exactly the best starting point for objective (never the case, frankly) criticism.

Anyway, I have little reason to worry. It will soon become obvious to listeners of all  stripes that A-morph, a conceptual work about transformation of the kind that comes reconciling seemingly disparate lyrical and musical elements – primarily the abstract vs. the pointedly political (a duality that lies at the core of the group’s aesthetic sound), but also between their private lives vs. the public world of a rock band as well as the balance between the twin pursuits (not always mutually exclusive) of art and commerce, is a rich and rewarding album. Much the White Stripes (another duo), SoH has always been a band defined by – and perhaps striving to transcend – dichotomies of various sorts: male and female, black and white, peace and anger. And even in their music, much like forebears Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Pixies, even Zeppelin, contrasting sections of loud and soft, ethereal and overpowering often play themselves out. Rather than subverting contradictions, SoH embraces them; it bravely sticks out the battle. The word “brave” is fitting; Kelly’s singing always sounded to me to be larger than life, towering way above her diminutive frame, particularly on recordings.

Warriors of the Light was a courageous album, a product of young artists baring their souls, daring to display nakedness and idealism to a world unaccustomed to the exhibit. Even that album cover – and SoH freely acknowledges the importance of cover art to the appreciation of rock – demonstrated their two-headed nature as if it wasn’t clear enough on record: the two principals faced in opposite directions, fused together at the back of their heads, unable to connect with each other – at least not visually. The music on Warriors was endearingly bi-polar as well, the seams between Kelly’s contributions and those of Canales left largely unmasked. Part of the charm, I remember thinking, bouncing alongside unceremoniously-tossed off MicroKorg riffs. On their latest effort, the collaboration is much more fluid and comfortable, and the MicroKorg riffs are largely absent. Here, SoH manipulates contrasting lyrical and musical elements without self- consciousness seeping through, as though – and it can’t be a coincidence that the couple has since tied the knot – Kelly and Canales are no longer afraid out of sheer politeness to shape each other’s contributions, which can often happen in a band with more than one songwriter.

Nope, nothing’s tentative on A-morph (nor is the disjunction evident on the cover art).  Paranoia and murder run rampant on the album’s first half. Bullets fly, as do short, punchy riffs, and sections sound frantically pasted together into prog-rock songs (think Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”). In “Jab Away” (track 2), sides are chosen right off the bat; it’s Washington bad-boys and “secret sons” pulling rabbits out of hats pitted against “Andalusians” who can only “shake their heads” in disbelief. Kelly sings, “It’s a really bad time to be faithless/ It’s a really bad time to be faceless and alone,” and in “No. 16” (track 3 – the song where their individual contributions are most evident) Canales sing-shouts, “Money for sale! Come and get it, people!” The three-minute song-length barrier isn’t broken until “We Will Live Again” (track 5) whose chorus (“I’m sorry that I pulled this world for so long”) pulls away from the self-deception characterizing much of
A-Morph’s first half. “Man or Moon” – along with “Maybe Today” and “Ladyhawk” a strong candidate for radio-friendly single-hood – best illustrates Kelly’s uncanny knack for pairing abstraction and political urgency, further driven home by the urgency of her vocals and Canales’ pounding. It recalls how she urged us to “See Bright Red” in last year’s “Spaceship Ride,” a miniature, filigreed fist pumping into the air. Here, Kelly pronounces, “Heat in the summer/bright in the stream of eternal things/ are you ready to get in the ring?” “Man” and “moon,” “real” and “reaction”: these dichotomies seem perfectly in keeping with SoH’s aesthetic of cohesive two-headedness.

Perhaps the album’s only weak moment, “Dunes” is a waltz that poses a riddle and interjects more conversational language (“Now here’s a riddle to figure out: which way is forward, which way is down? … Honey, it ain’t about the money…”). “Dunes” comes off as an interlude, a passage into the second half of A-morph, which is formidable and thematic. “Maybe Today” is tripping your ass off at a huge outdoor festival (“The colors are changing, I can feel the love running through my veins/ a free ride into your heart – what a big surprise/ when you catalogued every light and firefly”). Here, Kelly’s nuanced voice – she’s capable of making the word “catalogue” sound perfectly erotic – is at its most unabashedly romantic and physical. “Ladyhawk” is a call to arms for robotic, “weekend sorcerers,” “life-like, with motors inside,” complete with an epic, arena-worthy chorus (“Do you see us cut like a talon, fly like a falcon, bite like a snake?”). Wetter, somewhat drowsier musical textures (accomplished in production through the greater use of reverb and echo) in the album’s second half are musically analogous to the greater confidence and strength of the lyrics, as though all of the jittery, stop-start paranoia, all of the jabs, flying bullets, killers, murderers, and money-driven, easy sugar-highs (all abstractly implied, naturally) of the first half are overcome. A song like “Omni” (track 4), for example, in which lyric fragments “like I told you before,” “I cannot be fooled,” and “you can never rely” are manically repeated four times before we are allowed to move onto the next thought, would be out of place. Instead, “Ladyhawk” is SoH at its most tribal, a standout cut with a droning coda, one ripe for extending in live
situations where people are recklessly shaking ass.

My natural inclination is to look for irony in the lyrics from “Daydream Nation” (the reference to Sonic Youth’s late-1980s masterpiece early offers further evidence of where the Hippies’ two heads are at, musically speaking) where Kelly’s and Canales’ agenda – if that’s the right word – is laid bare: “We fight for freedom and we fight for faith/we fight for children and we fight for grace/ to everyone who can carry on/ we fight for reason and the right to say.” But there is no irony. I don’t know if that’s unique, refreshing, or disappointing, but it doesn’t feel bad. In this context, irony would sound out of place.

A lot of us know that Sarasota’s has tons of musical talent, but A-morph offers even more than I had any reason to expect. Kelly and Canales recently asked Ryan O’Neill of Villanova Junction to jump on board when bassist Michael Møk departed a few months ago (“Ryan is a superstar,” Kelly wrote me, “like a bass player and lead guitarist in one”). Personally, I think a lot of people around the Bay and beyond will notice this one, and I can’t wait to hear what happens from here on out with O’Neill on board.

4 out of 5 stars
(5 stars being reserved for albums like Revolver, Blonde and Blonde, etc)."