Staying Alive




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March 20-26, 2003

music

Staying Alive

Arc DE Triomphe: Tim Kinsella swings back toward traditional songwriting with So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness.

The rumors of Joan of Arc’s demise were true for a while.

by Brian Howard

Joan of Arc, like its namesake, was dead.

The experimental Chicago rock band headed up by the controversial Tim Kinsella, with its listener-unfriendly leanings, had taken its lumps in the press as a matter of course. Pretentious, pompous, contrived and talentless were all barbs lobbed at the band. But the reaction to the band’s challenging, out-of-focus, über-concept 2000 album, The Gap -- wherein the band pushed listeners too far with songs that didn’t match up with CD track breaks, ProTools shenanigans aplenty, looped sampling and Kinsella inexplicably changing his name to Tim Kinsellas -- tested the patience of even Joan’s staunchest allies.

How Can Anything So Little Be Any More, a collection of leftovers from The Gap sessions, was billed as posthumous when it was released in 2001.

Loose ends tied, final nail driven, kindling at the stake lit, Joan of Arc was dead.

Until February 2003, when Joan of Arc emerged from the ashes, sort of, with the chilling So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness (Jade Tree). The album saw Kinsella reunited with the murky specter of traditional songcraft -- estranged since the band's gorgeous Live in Chicago 1999. The haunting album opener, "On a Bedsheet in the Breeze on the Roof," paints an indelible image of a party, whose attendees, driven to the roof by the summer heat, watch student films projected on a bedsheet on an adjoining building. "Mr. Participation Billy" is a violent, singsongy waltz, while "Diane Cool and Beautiful" plays like an aloof tribute to a jaded friend. It's 11 tracks of clean-channel loveliness and lyrical abstraction.

Kinsella admits that after The Gap, his songwriting really couldn't get any further out there. "I've never heard The Gap since I listened to the test pressing," he says on the phone from his Chicago home. "I spend my time with the records and just really get immersed in them. And then they're just kinda surrendered. But I will admit that The Gap was like the record that I feel most uncomfortable about. I feel like we did everything that we set out to do, but I just, now in retrospect, can't relate to it as much as some of the others.

"I think that was really the pendulum swinging as far as it could in one way and the pendulum has swung back."

The reunion on So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness was hardly intentional. In the liner notes, songs are credited variously to Joan of Arc II, Friend/Enemy, The Sam Zurick Band and Mr. Joan of Arc. The album, as it turns out, was never intended to be a Joan of Arc album, but rather parts of three different albums.

The songs were being written and recorded concurrently in the same studio with various Kinsella side projects, Friend/Enemy, The Sam Zurick Band and a solo effort, all with significant personnel overlap.

"We realized, we're all recording in the same studio over the same two months with all the same people," explains Kinsella. "It was just a matter of, like, if my brother [Mike] was there in the afternoon it was called one thing, and if he was there at night it was something else. That was kind of stupid."

Deciding what to call the band was a challenge. "We were like, well, eight of the nine people that've been here today and yesterday were in the last versions of Joan of Arc. I guess it's Joan of Arc," recalls Kinsella, "then we told Jade Tree and they're like ŒNo, everyone hates Joan of Arc, you can't name it Joan of Arc. Make it your first solo record.'"

Uncomfortable with releasing a solo record, Kinsella pushed to attach the Joan of Arc tag, and Jade Tree, the band's label for most of its career, finally agreed. But the label only took half of the material. The second half, which Kinsella calls "the weirder songs," will be released in May on a Perishable Records album with the sure-to-rankle title In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust.

On that album, you can feel the pendulum swinging again, with lots of samples, splices and loops competing for attention. "Happy 1984 and 2001" is a discordant political manifesto with a screamed chorus of "shadow government!" and the title track is, ostensibly, Kinsella's attempt to capture the effect that hearing Bauhaus' "The Sky's Gone Out" had on him at 10 years old. It's a stunning, if less accessible, piece of work.

Kinsella has since recorded with Ministry/Revolting Cocks guy Chris Connelly under the name Everyone.

"And now, in just like the last week or two I've been like working on my computer again," says Kinsella. "I already feel the pendulum swinging back."

Long live Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc plays Wed., March 26, 7:30 p.m., $8, with Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, The Love of Everything and 33 Slade, First Unitarian Church, 22nd and Chestnut sts., 800-594-TIXX.

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