Ear Piercing Sound Rumble

In Western music the number four has a curious predominance: in meter (4/4 being so standard it's marked with a "C" for "common"), in group size (barbershop quartets, string quartets, choral music), in the quadripartite form of the symphony, in quadrophonic speakers. There are too many exceptions to count, but they only gesture to, if not quite prove, the rule.

The Platonic ideal of the rock band seems particularly wedded to the four-member model, probably thanks to the Beatles. And we all have a general sense of what those four roles are: drums, bass, lead guitar, and rhythm guitar, with vocals typically the domain of one or both of the latter (or in the case of the early Fabs, all three of the guitarists). The first two of these jobs seems non-negotiable for a rock band (unless you're the White Stripes or the Black Keys), though another popular variation is to have just one guitarist, and a lead vocalist, unencumbered by an instrument, who handles all or most of the singing and strutting (The Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2, No Doubt, the Go-Gos, the Who). Obviously many of the compressions in band size happen when you have a strong instrumentalist who's also the lead singer (Rush, the Police), or it's a genre where instrumental virtuosity is not quite the point (Green Day). But the pull of four is such that a band like Cake, say, though essentially self-sufficient as a bass-drums-guitar trio, uses the band's fourth slot to bump it with a trumpet.

The pull of four is there even when you're not really doing rock at all. I think of the extraordinary Dave Malloy show Ghost Quartet, in my opinion his most fully realized music-theater work, in which the band faced each other from the four corners of the stage and comprised Dave on keyboards and vocals, Brent Arnold on standup bass, and two female vocalists, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, on voice and dulcimer and percussion. The four-ness of that show had little to do with the traditional soprano-alto-tenor-bass divisions, let alone with traditional rock instrumentation; but it felt essential to the piece nonetheless. I suppose you could argue that it most resembled the sonority of a string quartet, with its double soprano voices, i.e. two violins, undergirded by viola and cello.

The four-ness of Hugo Largo, a great, short-lived experimental band of the 1980s that wasn't quite doing rock either, also seemed central to its makeup. In contrast with Ghost Quartet, Hugo Largo flipped the string quartet sonority for the very eccentric, bottom-heavy lineup of two electric basses, violin, and vocal. They first came to my attention on a compilation cassette from Relativity Records with the seething exercise "Grow Wild." I recall reading something around that time about their lead singer, Mimi Goese, brandishing a butcher knife onstage, and this rubber-room music completed the picture: almost free of tempo, I heard a brooding miasma of bass notes and an air-raid violin over which Goese's keening, double-tracked soprano soared and seared, a pterodactyl surveying a field of lava. 

On their full-length album Drum, produced by Michael Stipe, they had a kind of twin for that song, the very similar and similarly titled "Scream Tall," which in itself is a handy if reductive phrase to describe their sound overall—the scream coming from Goese and violinist Hahn Rowe, of course, and the sense of height from the sturdy scaffolding of Will Sommer and Adam Peacock's basses. Even with the addition of some guitar, it is a fairly limited sound—probably the reason they only made one more album, Mettle, before breaking up—but within its self-imposed confines they fashioned artifacts of transfixing, often mesmeric beauty and singularity, in a sound world that somehow perfectly realizes what founder Sommer originally conceived as "a quiet noise band."

There are bits of keyboard and guitar supplementing the basic components, but the formula for most of the songs is: insinuating ostinato on one bass, cross-hatched with the other bass in a slightly different register to create or suggest interesting harmonies, with Goese's vocals rappelling up and down the walls of sound a la Björk, or another female singer who emerged around the same time, Sinead O'Connor, and Rowe's violin embellishing the top end with atmospheric drones and curlicues. Stipe can be heard adding his signature groan to the beautiful "Eureka," while the band's cover of the Kinks' "Fancy" doubles down on the tendency of their drone-like sound toward Eastern scales. For my money the resounding "Second Skin," with its cathartic verse-chorus rise and fall, feels as close to a "single" as the record possesses (it's the song I would put on mix tapes for friends as a kind of user-friendly gateway).

I could find no videos with Goese wielding a blade, but she clearly had quite a stage presence—her background was in performance art, and she has since made some interesting music-theater pieces. This whole show from 1987 may be as good an intro to their enveloping sound as any of their records:

Next is the only proper music video I could find, of the lovely but unremarkable "Turtle Song." You can hear in this how the band was beginning to chafe at the edges of the brooding chamber-music trap they built for themselves; without fresh inspiration or a new angle there was only so much they could do with these four elements.

The band's cohesion was also clearly somewhat attenuated, on the evidence of this oddly composed interview. I would direct your attention to Goese's withering side eye when the garrulous Sommer describes her performance art, at 5:10. And, of course, to the band's irreducible four-ness.