Reviews

Zen Guerrilla, Cash Money
Bottom of the Hill
Wednesday, Oct. 15

Even though they dropped out of Philadelphia three years ago, Zen Guerrilla are an S.F. band -- and that's a good thing. San Francisco mainstream bands are pathetic (Counting Non-Blondes, Blind Eyes, and Crows), and the local indies are losing relevance fast. The ailing S.F. music scene needs a Zen Guerrilla infusion more than its participants know.

Zen Guerrilla opened a monthlong tour two Wednesdays ago at the Bottom of the Hill with Chicago's Cash Money supporting. With but two members, on guitar and drums, Cash Money sound beefy. Playing to a largely empty room, they valiantly strove to overcome the limitations of their instrumentation with a set of songs that used the blues as a launch pad and took off through rockabilly and grunge with frequent blasts of punk rock. Both players spent the set apparently deep in concentration, which allowed them access to their substantial musical gifts and kept the songs afloat, despite the fact that dynamics was the only tool they carried beyond the straight sounds of their amplified instruments.

Zen Guerrilla, who just released a 7-inch EP on Alternative Tentacles, move beyond the sonics of a traditional four-piece rock band by couching their songs in noise. While not a particularly novel approach, it works well enough to put distance between Zen Guerrilla and bands like Aerosmith or Lynyrd Skynyrd, two other muscular rock groups who use rhythm and blues as a touchstone, but not well enough to distinctly separate them from contemporaries like the Blues Explosion and the Delta 72. At the Bottom of the Hill, vocalist Marcus Durant drenched his glossolalia in a thick soup of digital delay and reverb, constantly adjusting it via the effects unit standing prominently downstage left. His guitar, absently groped before a few songs, emitted nothing but shrieks of feedback, which in turn flowed through the same effects console. The rest of the band was not so much tight as compact, the sounds of guitar, bass, and drums snugly fitting into one another like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

Zen Guerrilla have one attribute that marks them as fundamentally old-school punk: They look insane, and are as ugly as a snootful of crank. (When did all those pretty people start playing punk, anyway? It's wrong.) They look like the type of people who'd follow you home from a bar and never leave, forcing you, ultimately, to move.

This potential danger is certainly heightened by the music; Zen Guerrilla's songs have the distinct flavor of malice and threat. Durant crawled the stage shrieking with the microphone practically down his throat, but still demonstrated his honest ability to sing when necessary. Guitarist Rich Millman pulled riffs out of his instrument with a thrilling disregard for accuracy, while bassist Carl Horne and drummer Andy Duvall played so fiercely and tightly together that there was ample room for Millman's guitar to go off into dissonant and spacious leads without the power of the song suffering.

What you have here is simply a damn fine band with musical skill and the songwriting sense not to bore you with it. The energy Zen Guerrilla put into a small midweek show promises good things if there is ever a time when brave, original music can draw S.F. audiences like Neil Diamond- and ABBA-cover bands can today.

-- Paul Kimball

Janet Jackson
The Velvet Rope
(Virgin)

There's more to Janet Jackson's career than a string of hit singles. Each of her last four albums boasts a thematic unity that makes them much more than the sum of their songs: Control (1986) was about assertion of adult independence; Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989) traced the development of her social conscience; Janet (1993) celebrated the joys of love and was even kind of sexy. Her latest, The Velvet Rope, is about the inner resources that maintain a healthy level of self-esteem and the risks that such self-confidence can embolden you to take. As a whole, these four records -- chronicling Jackson's life from age 20 to 31 -- are a stunning body of work. Rarely has someone from such a dysfunctional family achieved adulthood with so much grace.

Jackson's music has grown more complex and nuanced with each recording. Given the Fiona Apple-/Tori Amos-ish theme, The Velvet Rope is refreshingly free of psychobabble. Jackson takes herself seriously, but doesn't spend a lot of time demanding that you do too. This position makes her songs work at many different levels. It's just as easy to groove on Vanessa Mae's contributions to the title cut as it is to delve into the metaphors about passion. Jackson and her producers, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, have good ears; they are especially adept at locating their own voice in styles they didn't invent. This leads to clever pastiches like the counterpoint of the Joni Mitchell "Big Yellow Taxi" sample with Q-Tip's low-key rapping in "Got 'Til It's Gone."