Michael Knott Review

Michael Knott Screaming Brittle Siren Blonde Vinyl 4.5 out of 5

Under normal circumstances, the only thing I hate more than reading long, self- indulgent record reviews is writing them.

But these aren't normal circumstances.

B.Q.N. wants this review by Friday, which means I have to mail it in no later than Wednesday, which means I have to write it tonight, since tonight's Tuesday. And that's O.K., except I only got this disc four days ago. And although I've already listened to it more than the five times that CCM magazine, for instance, requires that its critics listen to a disc, each listen, instead of helping me figure out what makes it tick, has made me less sure that I'll ever figure out what makes it tick.

And that's good. It means there's something going on here beyond the obvious. In fact, there's almost nothing obvious going on here to get beyond. Which means that Screaming Brittle Siren has nothing in common with most contemporary Christian music, music that by its very definition must be obvious in order to avoid being mistaken for something else.

I mean, let's not kid ourselves. Everything about ccm, even the artsy stuff that I occasionally enjoy (Steve Scott, Charlie Peacock, Ric Alba), is heavy-handed compared to, oh, Bryan Adams (whose Waking Up the Neighbors, I realize now, was probably the best album of '91, no, as I said an issue ago, Motorhead's 1916) or Amy Grant (whose current music isn't ccm at all, which is undoubtedly why it's also the best music of her 14-year career).

Screaming Brittle Siren (a title, incidentally, that's also a better review of this album that the one you're reading, so feel free to stop now) is full of surprises. The best one is that it smells like Nirvana even more than Weird Al. The guitars keep churning out crunge, giving off halos of feedback that crackle with fallout. That in itself is nothing new, and even if it were, that wouldn't make it good.
What's good is that Michael Knott integrates his amped-up onslaught until it sounds like what he means when he sings, in his powerfully doomy voice, lines like "Sometimes I wanna crash and burn" and "it's a swinging corpse that makes a sad heart sing," lines that on their own would just sort of stew in their own pretentiously oblique juices but that sound almost profound amid Knott's axework. And helping to keep it all lively is Chuck Cummings' sharp drumming, polished to a trebly sheen by a crew of engineers headed by the ever-reliable Dave Hackbarth.

There are also occasional interludes of spooky cello and violin playing that pop up, sort of like on the first two Velvet Underground albums (but not as screechy) or as if the Kronos Quartet had been recording next door and Knott patched a line in.

Of course, lots of what I've said so far could apply as well to lesser Michael Knott projects like L.S.U., the Lifesavers, or Fluffy. But where those ephemerids testify to Knott's whimsy and irreverence, Screaming Brittle Siren testifies to his commitment to chaos as a purgative force and to his commitment to laboring as long and seriously as he needs to in order to make it all worthwhile.
There are, however, two signs that Knott might have worked too hard on this. One is the hopelessly illegible way he's scrawled the lyrics to these 13 songs on the inside of the cover. Why bother if no one can read them in the first place? You know those two lines I quoted earlier? Well, I chose those because they were practically the only two I could read without getting dizzy or feeling as if I were participating in an electric Kool-Aid acid test, and this review's disjointed enough without my feeling like that.

The other sign of strain is that during this disc's last song, Knott takes a break. He just stops. And for two-and-a-half minutes there's nothing.

Now, you could take this as his tribute to avant-garde (de)composer John Cage, who's built his reputation on stuff like this, but more likely this is Knott's way of being nice to us, of thanking us for putting up with the musical and verbal brutality that went before. And I must say it's nice to have a CD that you can take a bathroom break during without missing anything.

Thanks, Michael.

The point here is that Screaming Brittle Siren is the first ccm album I've heard in all my years of ccm listening that sounds nothing at all like ccm. It doesn't even sound like the ccm that's not supposed to sound like ccm (Chagall Guevara, the new King's X album). If you think that defeats its purpose, that's your problem. I think that makes it downright heroic.

- Arsenio Orteza from Syndicate Volume 7 Issue 3