Rainer Maria
A Better Version of Me (Polyvinyl)
by Marc Hirsh
Rainer Maria
A Better Version of Me (Polyvinyl)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
If we ignore anything as simplistic as actual beats per minute, then Ranier Maria offer up a fascinating dichotomy, as the slow songs on A Better Version Of Me are (with one exception) the least interesting, while the fast ones are (with one half-exception) the best. Their songs seem to demand movement, which is stalled or delayed by a more pensive tempo. As evidence, simply compare "Artificial Light," the shining opener, with "Spit And Fire" seven songs later. They are built from almost identical materials, but the momentum of Kyle Fischer's guitar and William Keuhn's drums makes "Artificial Light" shiver with intensity (and thus I categorize it as a fast number) in a way that "Spit and Fire" won't acknowledge until halfway through when it gives up and begins leaping.
The best songs simply crackle with energy, like the closing "Hell And High Water." Over an instrumental bed that skips like a stone across the surface of a lake, bassist Caithlin Demarrais declares, "I've seen the girl who'll pick up where I leave off... She's a better version of me," and while I think she's convinced that she's catching a glimpse of her own future self, confronting the maturity and the death of the present that that entails, there's also an undeniably clear pre-breakup song in there if you want it, one that focuses on the sadness and frustration of impending romantic replacement. Both topics individually make a swell enough song (although my interpretation probably makes me a bit shallower than Demarrais's makes her), but the fact that each is embedded in the other is quite remarkable.
That nested double-meaning dovetails nicely with Rainer Maria's goal, which is, I think, to have every receptor, pleasure, pain, joy, sadness, everything, activated simultaneously and primed to the fullest. That's helped out immensely by Fischer, who somehow manages to make his guitar sound like a series of synth loops, no big deal when playing single-note lines but quite an impressive feat when playing full and ringing chords (see "Save My Skin" and "Artificial Light"). His swooping guitar also helps to redeem "The Seven Sisters" (the slow=boring exception), staving off the lugubriousness of "Ceremony" or "Atropine" (remember that title), although Demarrais's vocals are probably more important, soaring up to the heavens to which she swears she belongs. It's the only slow song on which she's allowed to be impassioned, and it benefits immeasurably.
The fast=good quasi-exception, meanwhile, is "The Contents of Lincoln's Pockets," which coasts along on a breezy melody as Fischer takes the title uncomfortably literally ("That there is Walt Whitman's pen," etc.). But then an odd thing begins to occur, as the music continues on but begins to pare itself down until Demarrais is left almost alone trying to comprehend the horrors of mortality: "Slammed to the back of your head... How can you deal with that kind of information?" This part of the song wants what the first part can't give it, so it just takes it from elsewhere.
And so A Better Version Of Me is uneven in the best possible way, as my desire for the less interesting songs to move on has as much to do with what I'm waiting to hear as with what's playing at the moment. One thing inexplicably makes me curious, though. In attempting to determine whether they mispronounce "atrophy" (they don't, exactly, but that doesn't make them any less willfully obscure), I discovered, oddly, that the word immediately following it in my dictionary (Mirriam-Webster Collegiate, 10th edition) is "atropine" ("a racemic mixture of hyoscyamine obtained from any of various solanaceous plants (as belladonna) and used esp. in the form of its sulfate for its anticholinergic effects (as pupil dilation or inhibition of smooth muscle spasms)"). Which begs the question: who's the bigger word geek, the band that would make such an arcane joke or the listener who actually spots it?