Rings

Rings: “Mom Dance”

from Black Habit (Paw Tracks)

urban folk-teen-pop//Out Jan. 15

(orig. pub. late 2007 or early 2008)  

          First Nation was populated by three women: Kate Rosko, Nina Mehta, and Melissa Livaudais. Their self-titled 2006 debut album featured mostly wordless vocals, guitar, and percussion. Now, with a different percussionist (Abby Portner, succeeding Livaudais), and a new album, Black Habits, the trio is Rings: “We thought the name First Nation would produce positive dialog, but it didn’t. It’s so loaded with identity politics, which is fine, because we actually do support other people’s ways of self-representing. But the name never opened up that space for talking about names and identity and social and political structures…and even if it did, that’s not what this new incarnation of our band is. For now, we’re like a pop band for teenage girls, and for now, Rings makes sense. It’s a name for our circular compositions, the bonds between us, our decision making processes, our mystic beliefs, the circular shapes around us, interlocking, connected, feminine whole, continuous…“

           Sure enough, they do make use of circles, cycles, with more words in the vocals now (good if you still want “positive dialog,” or to be “a pop band for teenage girls”), and of other sounds passed around: high voice and higher voice, going way, way out when necessary, but both bring (and ring) the changing sense of the words clearly enough; these are brushed by bluesy strands of guitar, like falling leaves, branches, snips of hair; jabbing or flexing or hovering keyboards; tom-toms, occasional snare, and cymbal-spills pulled into loops, in and out of the mix, along with, say, a sharp intake of breath, like the beginning of a sob or gasp, cut and spliced into a groove, not just to “normalize” it by repetition and control, but to use it as a point of departure, reference, creative friction, and sometimes plain compulsion. (As Mom would say, ”Stop picking at that! Go wash it!”)

         Seems like, as they perform live-in-the-studio, Rings are also looping samples of previous performances, improvisations, encounters, again as intermittent points of departure, reference, etc.  Loops that add to the overall invocation of “circles,” in terms of recurrence (including old feelings, problems, solutions), but which lead to/cut through cross-hatchings of narrative, of solitude and sisterhood, of struggle, of moments adding up, on a well-traveled, splattered, but almost too-legible sheet: “so loaded with identity politics” indeed, under whatever name. “You” and “I” can be friend, lover, parent, self, glimpsed in the street, the clock, the instrument, the audience, the absence, all under the skin. From all over NYC, feminine shapes and shades of time and space curve into and out of the tracks: intimations, but never imitations, of (for instance) early 60s girl groups (via harmonic convergences and consultations); paperbacks like Because They Wanted To and How To Survive In The Woods, eased into jeans while walking through subway newsstands; dub-paced  story-lines of NYC’s own E.S.G., and of pilgrims like the Slits and the Raincoats.

        Our featured track, “Mom Dance,” also suggests “a pop band for teenage girls” on ESP-DISK (home of the Holy Modal Rounders, Charles Manson and the Family, Patty Waters, MIJ, and many other campfire apparitions), circa 1965. That is, If any of those ESP outcats ‘n’ kitties showed up in time to match the release date of Sonny and Cher’s self-titled debut (speaking of the identity politics of friend, lover, parent, S& C play many roles with each other, as written and/or performed). Dig the tensions and resolutions squirming and strutting through unabashed sonic idiosyncracies, willful ways of hitting the note, and/or re-defining “hit.”  Thus the boom-boom and the jingle-jangle are passed through (back and forth), in Sonny and Cher’s give and take, and Rings’ “Mom Dance” too: no hand-me-down wisdom on this family holiday, unless you count (along) the wheel of   “Please let me you let me please let me,” and maybe you should, because the rim of it does cut a diamond hairline for the entering/escaping fresh air siren call, “You’ll find another dream, in a-nother, wor-ah-ah-orl-ld,” and here’s the fire escape to that, other sounds say! This leads certain headphonic travellers  to other questions: do the birds still speak Esperanto? Is the Pope still on the roof? Momma Bear will get back to you on that (and how).