September 16, 1999
Watching the MTV Video Awards last week drove home the point that if you want to sell records these days, guitar chops matter about as much as Ricky Martin's political views. Rap-metal hybrids, hip-hop-R&B hybrids and boy bands that appeal to the preadolescent girl in all of us currently rule supreme. Not that there's anything specifically wrong with any of this reaction against grunge's early domination of the decade's airwaves (except that most of it is uninspired and lame), but it left me itching to hear some good ol' fashioned blazing 6-string pyrotechnics. In a sampling and techno-based era where the guitar seems to be going the way of.....well.....the guitar, I humbly offer up some of the most exciting and inventive instrumental rock of recent memory. The Mermen wield their axes like Paul Bunyan, if Paul Bunyan were about 40 feet shorter, lived in San Francisco and carried a surfboard instead of riding around on an apparently oxygen-starved bovine. (OK, so they're nothing like Paul Bunyan.)
Sadly but predictably overlooked due to their focus on a genre that has only been popular in the public arena for about 15 minutes in the early 60's, this ostensibly surf rock band uses the conventions of the genre as a launching pad for thrilling forays into psychedelia, punk, classical, and whatever else washes up on their twisted shores. Guitars, guitars, guitars: Jim Thomas wrings acidic saltwater solos out of his Fender, riding curling waves of feedback like Dick Dale crossed with the cosmic Silver Surfer.
But these are far from your standard three-chord surf-rock ditties - the trio of Mermen actually compose (nodding to Brahms' third symphony on the final track), and their adrenaline-charged instrumentals ("Pulpin' Line", "Blue Xoam") benefit from their telepathic instrumental interplay as much as from their velocity. And on extended, 9-minute slower pieces like "Between I and Thou", they achieve a passionate grandeur that shows just how eloquent the electric guitar can still be in the right hands. Surf-rock is too limited a term for any band who takes in everyone from Hendrix to Thurston Moore to Brahms - no breaker is big enough to handle talent this huge. "Breathtaking" might not be too strong a word.
Thrilling surf symphonies