If Only It Was Up To Me: Acetone and experiencing the Art Object
Between 1992 and 2001, SoCalsound world’s Acetone barely kept afloat in a churning, alternative rock seascape. Their early songs were enough in line with post-Nevermind label tastes to get them picked up by Virgin’s Vernon Yard imprint. Then, their urge to lay there and let it all wash over them left the band adrift. Unmoored between country, psychedelia, jazz, pop and rock, Acetone’s inimitable languish garnered precious little attention at the time (though they had spots on tours with both The Verve and Spiritualized) due to Vernon Yard’s failure to give them the necessary promotion (at least, according to bassist/vocalist Richie Lee). They jumped ship to Neil Young’s Vapor, releasing two albums in 1997 and 2001. Then, shortly after the second of the two, Richie Lee killed himself.
Acetone’s beginnings are humble. Their first two releases – the Pinch and Acetone EPs – have their moments but often do little to stand out instrumentally. The vocal textures and toplines are occasionally wonderful, like in ‘Pinch’ and ‘Cindy’, the latter repeatedly unfurls itself before coiling back into stretches of subtlety that hint at the listless sound-world the band would later inhabit. Their 1993 debut, also called Cindy, stretches this procedure out over two LP sides, as songs like ‘Sundown’ enter a scuzzed up electric blues-rock rollick, while ‘Chills’ rips out a hardcore punk instrumental as Lee and Lightcap’s country-tinged harmonies gesture towards their wider range of influence. The highlights here, though, are ‘Louise’ and ‘No Need Swim,’ which pre-empt the dreary slowcore of acts like Bedhead and Low in their crawling, nocturnal insistence. There is nothing grunge about these sounds, except perhaps in the imagery they conjure: of Tracey-Emin-style dirty rooms, of bare and unpopulated cityscapes. The ride cymbal rings out, brushed or tapped, and the music expands to follow suit - all chiming guitars and resonant basslines.
On their later albums, Acetone first tip their hand then lay everything bare on the table. I Guess I Would’s choice of covers makes explicit their love for Americana, as they reverently devote themselves to John Prine’s ‘The Late John Garfield Blues’, Gram Parsons’ ‘Juanita’, Johnny Horton’s ‘All For The Love Of A Girl’, and The Fugs’ ‘How Sweet I Roamed’. The album is quaint, yet conjures the promises of desert expanse and luxuriates in its torrid vistas. ‘Border Lord’ complicates this as it blows out Kris Kristofferson’s 3-minute jaunt into an 11-minute scorched blues romp, more akin to dust bowl grit and heat than to a love affair.
If You Only Knew, on the other hand, is entirely original and sounds most like their 1997 self-titled album. These albums trade in hypotheticals, counterfactuals and in conditionals (“By the way, I would leave you alone / if you wanted / and would you know, would you do the same?” from ‘In the Light’; “And maybe when you’re gone / I’ll let you know” from ‘When You’re Gone’; “If you had your way / Would it stay the same?”, from ‘Every Kiss – New’) and use them as vehicle to tell stories of unavailing devotion. Lightcap and Lee were addicted to drugs at the time, and their professions to an unnamed “you” can be understood as carrying this tenor. That’s one reading, but the at once destabilising and entrancing emotional force of these songs is much more in the way they strain towards elegant hooks and then let them drop out from under you – the way they understand that the totalising forces of pain and obsession consume you but are not reducible to one particular feeling. It is not made intelligible by interpretation, it can only be felt.
On York Blvd., Acetone masterfully captures this effect in rock-as-form. Incorporating technology more exuberantly than on their last two albums, the songs burst and teem with Hammond organ, drum machine and guitar effects as much as they do clean bass and shaker parts. Songs like ‘Vibrato’, ‘It’s A Lie’ and ‘Like I Told You’ masterfully abide in classic rock arrangements. Where, say, ‘Pinch’ stuck to form to a fault, Acetone now translates their influences into pop songs that couldn’t have been made by anyone else, even while the songs move in ways you’ve almost certainly heard before. A reductive view of this album might take the lyrics of ‘Things Are Gonna Be Alright’ as totalising, the album a cry for help from a tortured artist. But I ask how one could listen to the trading of organ and guitar solos on ‘Vaccination’ and hear anything but three people revelling in the fun of music-making.
It is hard, when talking about Acetone, not to see their career as a vehicle delivering us to the tragic end of Lee’s life. We do ourselves and him a disservice, however, when we treat his death as punctuation or pure elucidation, as Lee living out the despondence we hear in the songs. It’s important, though, not to let this cause us to forget how unsteadying the music can be, as it resists reduction and asks us to submit to texture. This deference to texture is most obvious in their best song, ‘Smokey’. Lee’s drenched vocals strain gorgeously towards clarity that their medium could never impart (reminding me of ‘Express Your Love’ by Sweet & Innocent, an R&B gem recently re-released on the Numero Group, where the vocals buzz and chafe against the recording equipment as it fails to contain their majesty). All the while, the band sounds like where indie rock goes to die. Sounds we know and love elsewhere are left obfuscated, but the feeling remains. In fact, feeling might be all that remains.
William Doyle, writing about David Bowie’s Blackstar for the Quietus, describes the “small window where the weight of interpretation [in light of Bowie’s death] didn’t burden the brilliant work that was already available to us without it.” The window for Acetone may have been a little larger, but we should not let it slip us by forever. We can and should return to the state where art exists first as feeling and experience, where we can lie on the shores of Acetone’s expanse and let the waves lap at our feet. And maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll carry us away.