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The Daily Hampshire Gazette SCHOOLED
in POP Thursday, July 25, 2002 -- LISTENING to "Henning's School for the Dead," a CD of songs by Northampton musician Henning Ohlenbusch, I was struck this week by a simple truth: I like contemporary rock a lot more than I used to. Not that I've changed much; it has. To oversimplify, my old beef was with thrash, hardcore and metal, and with any band that operated on the principle that the louder and more distorted the sound, the better. I admire AC/DC and Dinosaur Jr., but wouldn't actually want to be in the same town where they were playing, much less the same building. The happy influence of the Cowboy Junkies, with their ultra-slowed down tempos and herb-tea ambiance, and locally of the similarly inclined Scud Mountain Boys, must have had something to do with it. Anyhow, bands around here like Steve Westfield's Slow Band and the Aloha Steamtrain developed a sound that I suspect I was not the only person glad to hear, when it started displacing noise rock on Valley bandstands. Punk deserves a lot of the credit too. Nasty and loud or not, punk bands stripped away pretense and called new attention to simple chords and plain singing, and some of their successors have picked up on the idea that intelligible lyrics really are art, and that, by the way, there's still a lot to be said for melody. Certainly Ohlenbusch fits this description. "When I grew up," he said Monday, "the music I listened to was always more melodic, poppy stuff. Also maybe more cerebral or something. Paul Simon, Robyn Hitchcock, of course the Beatles, and Lou Reed. That's always been with me." Of his songwriting, Ohlenbusch observed, "I'm always trying to go for emotions, heartstrings, without worrying about being tough." That spirit shaped the songs on the debut "Henning's School for the Dead" recording, a splendidly coherent and most definitely melodic set of 13 tunes Ohlenbusch recorded in Northampton two summers ago. Rock fans who frequented the Bay State and now hang around Harry's may already know some of these songs, but the band, which is called School for the Dead, is still basically new. Ohlenbusch's rock career began in junior high school in Andover, where he played in a band with his pal Russell Brooks. In western Massachusetts Brooks is better known as Lord Russ, frontman of the Aloha Steamtrain. After finishing a bachelor's degree as a music major at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Ohlenbusch moved to Northampton to keep in touch, and on stage, with Lord Russ, playing bass in Aloha Steamtrain and also anchoring the band Humbert. Meanwhile, he wrote songs that weren't part of the Steamtrain's repertoire. "Henning's School for the Dead" was his avenue for recording them, solo, but when it was time to celebrate the release of the CD, he needed more people to play the stuff. "I put together this band to have a CD release show, and that band was so good we kept it together." That band, whose members have played together sporadically while being parts of other groups, includes drummer Brian Marchese of Aloha Steamtrain; keyboardist Ken Maiuri and bassist Max Germer; and lead guitarist Anthony Westcott, who played with Humbert. "It's kind of a super-pop group," said Ohlenbusch. "If I had to do it all over again and pick a band from everyone I knew, it would be these four guys." Since Ohlenbusch played all the instruments on the recording, you don't actually hear the other four on the disc, but you can hear them and watch them tonight in Northampton at Harry's, which it seems to me would be a good thing to do. Ohlenbusch has released at least a dozen songs eminently worth attention, and more are on the way. "We were recording all day yesterday," he commented when asked whether a sophomore disc was in the works. The debut School for the Dead material is so rich in verbal color that picking an example is extremely arbitrary, but how about the opening lines of "Soup of the Moment"? It's unremarkable the way
that she smiles, The words are carried by a tune so happy you'd think it was written in the mid-60d, maybe even by Herman's Hermits, with peppy, crisp drumming and a very clean electro-acoustic bass line under Ohlenbusch's unaffected singing. Another tune is self-consciously rich with alliteration, with lines like "the lawyer laughs and lurks about" and "the pointlessness of the pontiff, the shame of the sheriff." "If there's a current trend toward this type of music, I don't know," said Ohlenbusch. "I run the sound at Harry's every Monday, so I see a lot of bands come in. Last show there was a big punk show, and it was packed. But anyway I'm more interested in the musicality of it than the statement." Distinguishing his music from Aloha Steamtrain, he suggested, "Aloha Steamtrain is a little more about the show. (School for the Dead) is a little more down to Earth." A defensible statement; Aloha Steamtrain's songs play more to the gallery, while Ohlenbusch's seem more reflective. (They're both good, and the Valley will miss Aloha Steamtrain when it disbands soon, since Lord Russ is reportedly moving to Hawaii.) Part of that reflectiveness, by the way, is a very contemporary kind of self-consciousness. In 2002, it's too late to write and sing a rock song that is unaware of its many predecessors. The charm comes in the fact that even though the writer/singer/band is obviously conscious of all the allusions it is making, the excitement is genuine. Speaking of old pop music, even pre-rock stuff, Ohlenbusch said, "We can see the song apart from the crap that went with it. We could play a Neil Diamond song and all love it. People would say, 'But that's a Neil Diamond song!' and we'd say, 'But it's a great song!' " Hear some great songs tonight
at Harry's, from 10 p.m. onward. Lofine shares the stage. |
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