I’m 45, these days.  Big thrills come fewer and farther between than they used to. 

Which in many ways is a good thing.  When you’re a teenager or an overdramatic twentysomething, hormones and that lack of jading that most of us start out life with make way too much stuff seem like life and death.  The dumbest stuff matters like life and death when you’re a kid – and having two teenagers in the house, I do see that all the dang time.

One of the things that’s have some of its searing immediacy shaved off over the years is rock and roll. 

I used to wear my heart on my sleeve when it came to music; thrills and chills in the form of a thousand little moments were all over the place.  They came in places you’d expect – Darkness on the Edge of Town and London Calling and Who’s Next and The Pretenders and The Crossing and Tim and The Unforgettable Fire and Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive), sure – all of them are albums that are packed full of big moments that seemed to sum up big chunks of my life. 

And beyond that, there are a zillion other little moments – not even necessarily on songs I like, even, but moments where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard them, and describe the jolt it gave me.  “We Live For Love” by Pat Benatar takes me back to the first night at my first radio job; “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, hanging around the dorm my freshman year of college; “Forever” by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul is always tied to sitting at the dam and looking up at the stars in the summer of ’82; “GirlUWant” by Devo is inseparable from high school speech team trips to Fargo and Grand Forks; “Nights In White Satin” by the Moody Blues is all about sitting in a car at 2AM, lovelorn and anxious to get the hell out of North Dakota…

…and I could go on.  Indeed, over the past six years on this blog, I have gone on.  But most of those are interesting to me as historical artifacts – sort of an audio museum of my life. 

These moments – little snippets of musical genius or just emotional accidents in the right place at the right time – happen less and less often these days.  And when they do happen, lately, it seems like they’re mostly songs from way back when that make me wonder “how did I miss this one, or forget it, all these years?”

I can count the number of artists that’ve made me sit up and go “Yeaaaaah!” and feel that jitter up my spine that comes from having a big epiphany, that’d make me think “I’ll remember where I was when I heard this the first time”, on probably a couple of fingers.

Eminem’s Eight Mile soundtrack had a bunch of ’em.

Franky Perez?  Poor Man’s Son had a bunch – enough to make me think he was a Cuban-American Springsteen when I first caught him, five years ago.  That he is not a superstar is an indictment of the American music industry.

But most of all, there’s Marah.

Marah is a band from Philadephia, Brooklyn, or points somewhere in between depending on who you google.  And calling them a “band” is a little misleading – it’s really the Bielanko brothers, Dave and Serge, along with (for the past couple of years) keyboardist Christine Smith.  They’ve been around for a long time – their discography goes back to 1997 – but their national breakout of sorts came in 2000, with Kids In Philly, an album recorded above an auto-repair shop in Philadelphia that evoked Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle in enough ways to set an amateur music critic off on a Hornbyesque orgy of taxonomizing.  The lyrics were as rapid-fire and dense as anything Springsteen wrote pre-Jon Landau; the music was as gleefully, eclectically alt-country as Springsteen’s sophomore effort swerved between rock and R’nB.  And Kids in Philly was about Philadelphia – or at least the neighborhood the album came from, with its Italian diners and Vietnamese barbers and South Asian groceries – as E Street Shuffle was about the Jersey Shore via Bleecker Street.

The similarities didn’t escape the critics or, more importantly, me.  “Faraway You” is a banjo-driven (?) raveup that’s equal parts zydeco and rockabilly, with a little Irish snuck in there (you have to work for it).  “Point Breeze” evokes E Street Shuffle‘s title cut, while “Christian Street” takes the same spirit and sticks a rocket-booster horn section behind it and wraps it with a production style that tries to mimic the Spektor “Wall of Sound” on a tiny budget, with glorious results; they bring in legendary Philadelphia disk jockey Hy Lit to kick things off, tying together five decades into three minutes.  “The Catfisherman” is a slinky bit of funk blues with a nasty surprise.  And for all the joyous stomping and pre-Sorpranos underworld tourism, some of the lower-key moments stick out just as much; “My Heart Is The Bums On The Street” may be the best closing-time lament since the Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular”. 

And if that’d been their only contribution to music history, I’d be sitting here, eight years later, raving about them still.  It was the kind of album a great garage band should do; yes, done in/above a garage, but brimming with a glee at being able to play rock and roll that crackled through the headphones and made you think, damn, it isn’t a sin to be glad you’re alive.

For a while, it seemed that’s what I’d do, eventually – write about a great old album.  I followed the band via their website for most of the last eight years; along about 2004, it seemed they were going to be consigned to the “acoustic duo show” ghetto, playing coffee shops and little clubs to the hard-core fans. 

And yet not only have they soldiered on, they’ve gotten better.  2005 brought If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry, an even better album full of even better moments than Philly. 

And earlier this year came Angels of Destruction, maybe their best yet.  And, like any “best yet” from an unknown, almost-there band, it couldn’t happen without a problem; on the even of a tour in support of the album, their rhythm section quit; Marah, indeed, seems to go through backlines like Spinal Tap went through drummers.  The Bielankos and Smith forged on, and are on the road again, sort of. (Hint, guys – the Twin Cities.  C’mon). 

And yet the album absolutely shimmers; there are too many high points to name – the title cut, “Coughing Up Blood”, “Santos De Madera” and enough others that I’m going to start sounding like a shill before long. 

Which’d be a shame – because the point is, as I’ve gotten to be older, I’ve gotten to be a lot harder to impress.  Hell – it’s gotten a lot harder for me to notice music and remember it.  And yet Marah – bittersweet, joyful and rollicking and smoky and sweaty and eccentric and maddeningly-just-shy-of-famous and occasionally pit-of-the-soul poignant – never misses. 

And hey – nice to know there’s other fans out there – that’s a blog that posts lots of videos, including a few full performances, including this one at Weert, Holland.  Worth a look.

Anyway – your mission is clear.  If you only buy one album this year, buy Kids in Philly and If You Didn’t Laugh… and Angels, too.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.