Speakerwire Collins
The Boy Said My Name’s Johnny Cassette
unreadrecords.bandcamp.com
Speakerwire Collins is Brian Boelman of the Miracles Of God and Iowa City’s most unpredictable guitarist, bassist and songwriter, Ed Gray. They’re the third bass and drum duo I’ve reviewed in recent months, and they’re completely different from Acoustic Guillotine and the Post Mortems. For The Boy Said My Name’s Johnny, Gray sings at the bottom of his range and lapses into a comically exaggerated country twang. Gray picks out nimble, swinging electric bass lines, which Boelman meets with simple, laid-back drumming on a small kit.
The song “The Biggest Pose” opens the album with lyrics that dismantle the po-faced earnestness of the underground band scene. “The biggest pose I know is authenticity … we play in our work clothes … we’re plugging in our guitars like punching a clock.” There’s humor, bitterness and Gray’s trademark goofy surrealism (“The moth is the mirror, your face is the flame”), making a self-reflective mess of any clear meaning. In a good way.
As with every Ed Gray project, the songs are chock-full of memorable lines, but the sparse arrangements are arrestingly different from anything he’s done before, while cleaving to familiar styles like the country waltz. “Disinfectorant” is less than a minute, but has a great chord-heavy bass part. “Dog Years” is on the surface something I can imagine George Jones singing, but Jones would probably balk at lines like “Speak to me in dog years.” “Hunger Artist” namechecks a Franz Kafka short story: “The secret to starving is a good memory.” The greatest gift to a singer is a drummer who listens, and on this album, you can really hear that Boelman’s listening: His drumming is quiet and sparse, yet follows every twist of the bass and lyric.
Gray is truly a great songwriter, both as a lyricist and musician. He’s a unique, radical guitarist and, now, bassist. But his is not the name on everyone’s lips—locally or in the wider world—which may come down to not enough glad-handing or self-promotion, or his shy demeanor. All the local musicians know and respect Gray; maybe it’s time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
Kent Williams is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. He is only a test.
