Curried favors

Although I'd heard of him and heard and been intrigued by one or two tracks previously, it's primarily through the offices of my friend Miles that I've gradually become more familiar with the works of Nick Currie, b/k/a Momus. At first, I was a bit put off: the sleaze seemed gratuitous, and the music seemed to be inanely dancey or made up entirely of noises sampled from videogames. (Both descriptions are probably literally and intentionally true, for some songs...) His ideas seemed far more intriguing than his music...and "intriguing" (along with "interesting") is a graveyard of an adjective, the word one falls back upon when one is flummoxed in the face of something that can't be dismissed but doesn't seem readily enjoyed or understood. (His websites - one primarily concerning his music, the other increasingly serving as a workspace for his unlikely and increasingly prominent status as roving public intellectual - are indeed probably more interesting to most people than his music is.)

That said, slowly, over time, I've found his music more and more enjoyable (conveniently, now that his long out-of-print Creation recordings are likely to become available again, as Momus' own label has purchased the rights to them) and am slowly making headway into his rather dense catalog. The difficulties - readily apparent if you read more than a few pages of his writing - are that his interests are tremendously broad and, as a "non-popular" artist who is now more or less independent of the demands of labels, he feels free to indulge those interests - often all on the same album. On his most recent release, Otto Spooky, you can find everything from quasi-Baroque countertenor madrigals to faux-pagan folk to urban Euro-Arab dance numbers - not to mention all kinds of unclassifiable experiments. I'm not sure what you'd call "Lute Score" - but there probably isn't a pre-existing musical schema to accommodate lyrics that (insofar as they're about anything) concern themselves with a videogame whose interconnected goals are writing a tune for lutes and blowing the heads off of animated pandas. Logically, though, Momus' solution is to combine vaguely Eastern scales with a rhythm derived from children's songs. Of course.

Going back a bit further in his career, to his 1995 release The Philosophy of Momus, we find not only a song of that title but possibly my favorite song of his (judging by number of mixes it's ended up on: tied with "Jesus in Furs," his topical rejoinder to Mel Gibson's S&M paean to blood-n-guts Christianity), "The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko," which also would appear to outline a Momus philosophy. Here we have a rhythm that seems derived from the clubs underlying an unsettled, almost jazz-like harmonic sequence, held together by a solid and straightforward melody.

Ten years earlier, we find "Little Lord Obedience" in an almost Nick Drake-like mode, musically - although I can't imagine Drake writing these densely allusive lyrics. If that all seems too pretentious to you, you might prefer one of the two (!) tracks that ended up being removed from Momus albums due to litigation, "Michelin Man" (the other is "Walter Carlos," from The Little Red Songbook's original release). Originally on the cringe-inducingly titled Hippopotamomus, the song incurred the wrath of the tire company, and the song was disappeared. Not entirely, though: when Aaron sent me a copy of his 2004 bests, it included "Blowin' Me Up with Her Love" by JC Chasez...and between the main metaphor and some sonic treatments, I'm pretty sure the track's producers had heard the Momus song. So that's how Momus (sort of) made the hit parade.

Momus "Lute Score"
Momus "The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko"
Momus "Little Lord Obedience"
Momus "Michelin Man"
Momus "Walter Carlos"
JC Chasez "Blowin' Me Up with Her Love"