El Paso Hot Button
When I Need Sympathy
Little Mafia
By Jose Fritz
Schrödinger didn’t wish to promote the idea of dead and alive cats as a serious possibility. He was trying to take a complex paradox from quantum mechanics and downscale it in a way that a layperson would understand. Sadly he underestimated the general stupidity of the average layperson. It was Albert Einstein himself that suggested the cat in a box as the metaphor. Al wasn’t so good with the hoi polloi either.
In his example, the closed box contains two possibilities: a dead cat and a live cat. The dead and alive states are decoherent. That’s your vocabulary word for the day. Decoherence defines reality, it prohibits simultaneous perception. The cat is alive or dead not both. Schrödinger believes that both states exist until the box is opened. That’s the paradox. Music reviewing is much the same way when you lack a biography, lexography and discography. The album could be good or it could be bad. Until you press play the album exists in both potential states simultaneously.
El Paso Hot Button jumps up very much alive. EPHB is one man, Mickey Reece. He has drum set, guitars, digital theremin and five long years of rocking Oklahoma City. For a one man band, he’s incredibly versatile. It sounds like Beck had to give up his sequencer, his sampler and play all his parts simultaneously. The idiom “one man band” conjures up images of the unshaven, grizzled bluesman stomping his foot on the splintered wooden bass drum and strumming sloppily on the Dobro while shouting about share cropping. Mickey’s got way better lyrics than that. He even quotes Public Enemy with the phrase “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.” That is a bad ass move.
His previous album Turtle Wars was an epic tale of giant turtles conquering the puny humans. It was a deranged hallucinatory tale complete with news clips and radio propaganda from the turtles. It was fucking unhinged and it impressed me with the sheer scope of its chutzpas. He’s a little embarrassed about the whole turtle thing now, but we all feel that way when revealing our most tangible fears; irrational or otherwise. In the studio this time he loosened up a bit.
When I Need Sympathy sounds like he might have cheated a little in the studio with some vocal overdubs. But the songs don’t stray much from that stripped down soul that made his songs so addictive before. It’s got that same bombastic pace as before. The one that Jon Spencer Blues Explosion celebrates -- the take on rock n’ roll that is simultaneously right and true and everything we all really need.
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