Marah

"I don't know why plain rock and roll doesn't work," says Dave Bielanko. Listen: This business about Marah and Philly, and rock music, and what's selling and who's buying, needs a little refocus. The band's straight biography is handily available elsewhere, but if we're going to talk meaningfully about the music, you and I, we've got to get our broader context straight. Flannery O'Connor spent most of her life on her mother's Georgia farm. Eudora Welty, born in Jackson, Mississippi, moved only once in her 92 years, from North Congress Street to Pinehurst. Recall a handful of other writers and their storied locales--Nelson Algren's grimy Chicago, Willa Cather's high cold Nebraska plains, Langston Hughes' thrumming Harlem, Robert Frost's frozen New England--and you'll further dig that it's not just regionalism, because it's not just looking at this place. It's looking at the world through this place. Brothers Dave and Serge Bielanko, who formed the core of Marah three years before the band's first record (1998's Let's Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later On Tonight), are "from" Philadelphia, see, like Faulkner was "from" Mississippi--in a way that, for nevermind whatever obsessive reason, caused them to soak up the music, the people, the culture, the walk, the talk, the whole damn history of the place they came from; to drink it down, ingest it; then to spit it out restrung, retuned, and rearranged. Like Scorsese's New York, Werner Herzog's Germany, or the London of writer Patrick Hamilton (whose early 1930s trilogy of novels provided Marah with the title of their new record), the Philly that Marah write and sing about is a place that bears crucial similarities to the actual locale--a little "South Street" here, a little "Camden" there--but mostly it's a vivid and unique creation, a high-test distillation of the real and the imagined. (Stop here: If the preceding sounds like so much breathless palaver, go put on "Feather Boa" from the new record, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. Just that song--that shifting-viewpoint character study of a nameless, coke-fueled cross-dresser, which somehow blends the sadness of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" with the rage of the Velvet Underground's "The Black Angel's Death Song"--sums up better than any promo sheet what Marah does best. "That dick between your legs / just makes me cry," sings Dave, and the dramatic setup makes the line work on at least three narrative levels. That's just good writing, aesthetic format be damned. Go put on "Feather Boa," and then, if you're still into it, come back.) Let's Cut the Crap was a messy, rattling junk-drawer of a record that drew comparisons to Exile on Main Street and Music From Big Pink (and oddly got Marah pegged as an alt-country band for a season or so, tho' the banjos on that album had less to do with the Stanley Brothers than with the Mummers' Parade). With their lauded follow-up, 2000's Kids in Philly, Marah might've pitched over into the "critics' favorite" bracken that lies alongside the path to prominence, and which hopelessly entangles most young, talented bands. This was the period when the accolades rolled in from the music critic heavyweights, when the Replacements/Springsteen/Stones/Clash/CCR comparisons got heavy, when the mainstream newspaper and magazine articles piled up with serious appreciation, when Nick Hornby called Marah's live show one of the 5 best he'd ever seen... in short, the usual combination of stranglehold pigeonholing and head-swelling praise that generally results in an ugly early flameout. But Marah, you gotta understand, is a band that believes in the rock and roll mythos--the saving grace, the excess, the exquisite burn, and all the rest of it. They also have a rare, savvy respect for the way wax wings tend to melt. And they talked back, smartly, to the KiP hype: One b-side of the "Point Breeze" single was a bittersweet examination of love as a record-store crawl, called "Why Independent Record Stores Fail"--you didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The other was a shambolic cover of Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" fueled by Serge Bielanko's martial banjo rills. And with that one you laughed so hard you cried--not because itwas smartass or snobbish, but because it cast the song's hammering solitude in a less somber and much hazier light--the narrator sounded disoriented and drunk, like the young men playing the song, on the streets and the sounds. 2002's Float Away With the Friday Night Gods was a turn from the specific to the general. So the band got the hell out of Philadelphia to Ireland and Wales, where the record was written and recorded, and produced by Mad Welshman Owen Morris--he of numerous Verve and Oasis albums. The sound of Float Away was wide, and expansive, and in content and form the songs sounded as far removed from KiP--partly by design, partly because of the process--as they could be. Some were flummoxed. "It was important for us to give up control," says Dave now. "But I think the people who'd been with us up to that point understood that element of it, if they'd followed the history of the band. We'd always controlled everything until then, and we needed to mess with that formula. So we gave [Morris] control over everything but the actual songs themselves--we gave everything over to a guy who knew nothing about us but those songs. And we loved him for it. We loved coming into the studio in the morning, and hearing him deconstruct what we'd done." Of Float Away Nick Hornby, an early and fervent supporter, recently wrote that the music Marah loves, the music that constitutes their most clearly audible referents, is getting old (well... it was old when The Band was playing it, too), and that the album was an attempt to kick the struts from underneath them, to keep themselves from getting comfortable. "I like the fact that we remind people of the music they grew up with," says Dave, "but after a certain point you have to wonder if you're making the same records over again." Having blown everything wide, the band decided to pull everything back for the next album--but those experiments with broader sound, now applied to more intimate songs and stories, results in a very different, farther-reaching record than any of their previous releases. So here's 20,000 Streets Under the Sky--of which now I find I want, maybe need, to say very little of descriptive substance, beyond the particulars of its creation. Suffice to say the band was determined, from the beginning, to create this record using no one's money but their own. They went back to Philly--though Serge was in London, and Dave in New York--to record and produce it, with Dave returning to the boards. Built and bought from within, then, 20,000 Streets is an independent record in the strictest sense, and though its environs and population are locatable once again--though its sound is local--its cinematic scope is wider than any of their previous records. This is a record that, more than any of Marah's others, reveals itself in layers. Check the city-sound flotsam, the field-recording pastiche effects that tie the album together, the street sounds and flute runs that open the record on "East," or (my favorite) the skip-rope playground rhymes of "Freedom Park." Listen to the twitchy kid who sings "Pigeon Heart," wondering why he's scared to leave a place that frightens him; or "Tame the Tiger," written from the perspective of a single mother, a hotel employee who shakes the "snakeskin sheds" out of bedsheets for a living and sees her son's tears in the rain pattering onto the windows of the city bus. Marah's writing about a bigger world with a broader cast; but I still can't think of many bands who write as compassionately about the people who inhabit their songs. Dave Bielanko thinks that maybe "what we're doing in the current climate [of the music business] is kind of obsolete. I'm not even sure there's really a space for what we do." Maybe he's right. Well, hell: There's never room for anything, until some enterprising person kicks a path. And anyway Marah's music does a pretty good job of making its own spaces. Put it on. And just let it play.