Brian Dewan Tells the Story

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Title: Brian Dewan Tells the Story
By: Brian Dewan
Released by: Bar/None Records
Released on: 1993
Rating (out of 10): 8
Date: 09/05/2001

Zither Me Timbers!

Mankind's greatest internal struggle: content vs. form. For years I was content to form my reviews as a creative writer would, what with her occasional ventures outside "the box" (ugh)—committing such misdeeds as the use of adjectives, metaphors, and the pronoun "I" in my quest to connect with readers.

Although such self-indulgent actions cannot be rectified in the course of a single review, I feel it is my duty as a citizen of Good Journalism to conduct myself in the proper manner. So mote it be; this review of Brian Dewan's 1993 debut album, Brian Dewan Tells the Story, follows a few happy-snappy/consumer-friendly editorial guidelines I've imposed on myself.

Make sure that you are stating accurate facts.

Brian Dewan is a singer, songwriter, and electric zitherist who lives in Brooklyn, NY. (That is to say the zither Dewan plays is electric, not Dewan himself. I'm sure the man's personality is quite magnetic.) His zither, self-built, is made of wood, electric-guitar parts, and harpsichord hardware, and eight Humbucker pickups. The zither's closest cousin in the instrument family is the autoharp. According to Dewan's website, the traditional zither is "composed of a flat sound box with about 30 to 40 strings stretched over it and played horizontally with the fingertips or a plectrum." Dewan's has 88 strings.

Dewan's other careers include composer for the Blue Man Group's long-running conceptual-theatre piece Tubes, designer of album covers (he constructed the shrine on the cover of the Lincoln LP by his good friends and sometime collaborators They Might Be Giants), filmmaker, and craftsman of fine furniture.

Also, if you have M2 (the MTV station only the cool people get—I don't), you may have seen the 40-second performance clip they drafted Dewan to do as a recurring ad for the network (which, I'm told, specializes in music that's a little left-of-center by regular MTV standards).

The electric zither is just one of the instruments Dewan can play, along with the accordion, autoharp, guitar, Moog synthesizer, "Mamola banjo" (described as "not a banjo at all actually but some weird box with buttons on part of it about a foot long and a few inches wide with strings stretched across it"), organ ("church and electric, not internal"), and Theremin (again, self-built).

Be original. Make sure it is your opinion and not a "borrowed" one.

Tells the Story is, in the most obnoxiously postmodern sense, a rock record. I don't know what else to call it. It's too catchy to be experimental, and much louder than a good 84.7 percent of modern classical music. It's a hell of a lot less boring than an overwhelming majority of "homemade-instrument music." It's closer to industrial and '70s wizard-metal, but there isn't a lick of percussion.

And there are lyrics, and they're funny. But not novelty-album funny or clever-guy-rock funny. They're perfectly serious—poignant, almost—like a parallel universe of ridiculousness that isn't unusual to Dewan in the least. His language is arcane; in a world of "coochie" and "thong," words like "pianola" and "washday" fall into his Rock/Pop songs without a clunk.

An excerpt from "Obedience School":

Back when I was in obedience school
I could fold a paper plane
I could wear a pilgrim hat
I could ring a dinner bell
Sit beside a metronome
Listen to an intercom
File into a corridor
Be made to do a jumping jack

His voice is as resonant as the zither it's competing with. Dewan, like the Johns of TMBG, is a Massachussets expatriate who sought fame and fortune in Brooklyn. I never noticed a Massachussets accent other than the Boston Southie and Kennedy-type accents, and perhaps some more rural accents, but I do hear the same crisp, nasal New England inflections in Dewan's voice and John Linnell's. Dewan's is more powerful, though—like a choral singer's, it's full of volume and vibrato. That said, it occasionally tends to resemble the voice of avant-garde hillbilly Peter Stampfel, Van Dyke Parks, or Yes' Jon Anderson filtered through a pitchshifter.

All the songs on Tells the Story are Dewan originals, but "Drinking Bird" steals the melody of the folk traditional "The Cuckoo." The drink the drinking bird drinks is water, not wine (the folk song's cuckoo preferred wine to water), but the title makes me think of Drinky Crow, the alcoholic feathered friend in New York-based illustrator Tony Millionaire's strip Maakies (nota bene: Millionaire has also done design work for TMBG). It's not a great song, but the connection bears mentioning.

The instant favorites here (I'm reaching back into my memory, since I bought Tells the Story 3 years ago) are "99 Cops," "Obedience School," and "Wastepaper Basket Fire." Lately, I'm partial to "The Day the Day Stood Still," a hymn that chimes and meanders while Dewan sings a ghostly tale of a town overtaken by absolute stillness. But "Wastepaper Basket Fire" is a mix-tape perennial. Picture these lyrics sung over a dirgelike electric-zither arrangement of what could be a grandiose Brian May guitar lead:

Try to smother it with that raincoat over by the window sill
Fill up every paper cup and empty every inkwell
Douse it with a pot of coffee lest it overcomes us
Evacuate before the room becomes a fiery furnace
Fire, fire, fire, fire, wastepaper-basket fire
Fire, fire; fire, fire! Wastepaper-basket fire

You must write at least 100 words.

I do not have a 100 words to say here a a a a a so I will give you information about how to order Brian Dewan Tells the Story, and his 1999 album, The Operating Theater. Send $15 to:

Immemorial Music Laboratory
18 Havemeyer St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211-2130

For more information:

http://listen.to/BrianDewan

Dewan also released two EPs through TMBG's now-discontinued Hello CD of the Month Club (the EP from '93 consists mainly of songs from Tells the Story, and the '94 EP contains a few experimental tracks unreleased elsewhere). Follow this URL for ordering information:

http://www.tmbg.com/catalog/hello.html

Compare issues. Tell the good and the bad. Help readers make a better decision.

The good is that Brian Dewan's music will take an industrial-grade nutcracker and shell your brain like so many halved walnuts.

The bad? From reading reviews people have posted of "difficult" music ("I can't tell you how many times I've had this CD playing and my friends and coworkers have given me strange looks and asked me what the hell I was listening to!"), I'm getting the impression that a saddeningly low number of folks want to be halved.

See, these inquisitors aren't asking because they're in search of new, vast musical horizons to challenge their intellect and enhance their lives; they ask because it's their role as "normal" people to point out things that are abnormal, to ridicule those who revel in eclecticism and thought-expanding cultural aberrations.

If you have Brian Dewan Tells the Story on at work, it's likely your office-mates won't think "This music is truly unusual, cerebral, and fun! My palate has been cleansed of the Top 40 dreck to which I have been accustomed since I was but a child. I'm gonna go see if I can sell that Shania Twain CD on Half.com!" Nope; they'll just gossip in the break room about what a weirdo you are.

Your "purchasing decision" all depends on how comfortable you feel with that.

© Copyright CultureDose.com 09/05/2001

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