{"id":458,"date":"2014-02-02T16:48:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-02T14:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/?p=458"},"modified":"2014-05-06T09:53:12","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T07:53:12","slug":"lies-to-live-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/?p=458","title":{"rendered":"Lies To Live By"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"<\/a>Endorsements and medallions first. The Del-Byzanteens’ \u00ab\u00a0Lies to Live By\u00a0\u00bb is a debut equal to anything out of New York these past six years. Now let me tell you why.<\/strong>
\nAlternative American music can be so lean and nervous, so fearful of luxury and amplitude. Sure ever since Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine and through Byrne and Chance’s crews, New York musicians have been cultivating a guitar style that communicates a subterranean stress but even when they take to synthesizers, they’re still laying down tripwires for the nerves.
\nBut didn’t I say \u00ab\u00a0alternative\u00a0\u00bb American music back there for that’s the nub. With the impossibility of a unified pop-culture that would give some encouragement to questioning imaginations, some confidence that they need not address themselves solely to minorities, dissenting Americans retreat to a painfully self-concious bohemian subculture. From the Del-Byzanteens, you’ll receive another samidzat; in \u00ab\u00a0Lies To Live By\u00a0\u00bb, more music warning of betrayal and faithlessness.
\nThe Del-Byzanteens know beauty but the beasts in their back-garden are their priority. In reckless desperation reversing the terms, the title track announces their themes when they admit: \u00ab\u00a0The truth\u00b4s a wound but the lies a gun\/Truth\u00b4s the blues but lies have fun\u00a0\u00bb. Don’t straightforwardly take those axioms as a last-gasp collapse into cynical falsity; their music plays the wound, the blues, the \u00ab\u00a0truth\u00a0\u00bb.
\nWith Phil Kline’s guitar pared to the bone, the Del-Byzanteens could be bare Bunnymen on a psychedelic decline not ascent. Even when Kline and his four colleagues, bassist Philippe Hagen, keyboardist Jim Jarmusch and their rimshot twins, Josh and Dan Braun, adapt foreign style, they drain them of any ceremonial colour. They reggae on \u00ab\u00a0Draft Riot\u00a0\u00bb and raga on \u00ab\u00a0War\u00a0\u00bb, re-enter folk-rock space on \u00ab\u00a0Sally Go Round The Roses\u00a0\u00bb and deal their Eastern card on\u00a0\u00bbGirls Imagination\u00a0\u00bb but these are not the stratagems of cultural magpies intent on impressing you with their exotic record collections. Through the wringer of \u00ab\u00a0Lies To Live By\u00a0\u00bb everything comes out Del-Byzanteen.
\nThey slowly graduate their message through the album leading up to the psychic gale warnings of the second side.
\n\u00ab\u00a0Draft Riot\u00a0\u00bb with its too-timely refrain \u00ab\u00a0I don’t know what happened\/I don’t know what you’re asking me for\/Is that all that hapened?\/Add it up and there ought to be more\u00a0\u00bb summarizes the triviality of war and \u00ab\u00a0conflicts\u00a0\u00bb though \u00ab\u00a0War\u00a0\u00bb itself is the one under-weight track in such heavy company.
\n\u00ab\u00a0Sally Go Round The Roses\u00a0\u00bb takes the primitive perenial and re-locates the lady in an undomesticated urban landscape.
\n\u00ab\u00a0Girls Imagination\u00a0\u00bb finds Hagen fingering that bass rumble, the legacy of \u00ab\u00a0Peter Gunn\u00a0\u00bb and Lalo Schrifrin, now beloved by his American instumentalists before his companions settle for a sinuous but never sensually-flattering groove and close in mocking vocal tumult.
\nBut it’s the closing tracks, \u00ab\u00a0Welcome Machines\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0Appartment 13\u00a0\u00bb that mark the Del-Byzanteens as something more than your usual art-isans. \u00ab\u00a0Welcome Machines\u00a0\u00bb shows their backgrounding in the film world with more B-movie pulsations from Kline and Hagen and a siren’s alert from Jarmusch as they advise the approach of the outer limits of technology, warning \u00ab\u00a0keep one step ahead of the impact\u00a0\u00bb. By the opening of \u00ab\u00a0Appartment 13\u00a0\u00bb the machines are in the house and salivating for the closing experimental instrumental.
\nLike Defunkt’s debut album, \u00ab\u00a0Lies To Live By\u00a0\u00bb marks the beast of dread and fights embitterment with countervailing passions.
\nDavid Byrne once remarked that we might be entering an absurd society where millions sat unemployed in tenements surrounded by useless video and other electronic equipement. The Del-Byzanteens alarmingly conjure with the same distortion of cultural possibility and economic and emotional stultification.<\/p>\n

Bill Graham
\n The Hot Press<\/strong><\/em>
\n12\/15\/1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Endorsements and medallions first. The Del-Byzanteens’ \u00ab\u00a0Lies to Live By\u00a0\u00bb is a debut equal to anything out of New York these past six years. Now let me tell you why. Alternative American music can be so lean and nervous, so … Continuer la lecture →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[24],"tags":[93,92,89,90,13,91,58,12,29,72,88],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42T3l-7o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/del-byzanteens.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}