COMBUSTIBLE EDISON
(BAR/NONE)
The most potent out-of-time, out-of-place passion currently going is for some of the more mundane aspects of 50s culture, from “tiki bars” and simulated Hawaiian luaus in suburban backyards to beatnik bachelor pads equipped with plush-consoled hi-fis. Urge Overkill genuflect before the well-made martini, posing with skewered Spanish olives in publicity stills and sipping carefully balanced cocktails in some of their videos. Recordings by once-discredited performers like Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Esquivel, up until recently found only in moldy thrift stores, are now highly sought collector’s items, valued for their garish Technicolor sleeves depicting various exotic scenes, many of them variations on a theme of a voluptuous woman in form-fitting clothes and strange jewelry or hats. The British band Stereolab named their song “Jenny Ondioline” after an early-50s synthesizer popularized by cornball Frenchman Jean-Jacques Perrey and use other equally outdated instruments to create their spectrum of “modern” sounds. In 1990 the top-notch archivists at Rhino Records released Exotica: The Best of Martin Denny, and forthcoming from Bar/None Records, home of tongue-in-cheek acts like They Might Be Giants and Ben Vaughn, is an Esquivel collection called Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. And there’s more: with similarly twisted nostalgists Love Jones, Chicago’s Coctails, Grenadine, and Combustible Edison gaining visibility and the notorious and thorough weirdo-culture journal RE/Search dedicating two recent issues to “Incredibly Strange Music,” a large portion of which focuses on the renewed interest in Baxter, Denny, Esquivel, and their ilk, something is certainly amiss.
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During Combustible Edison’s Chicago debut at the Empty Bottle a few weeks back, a makeshift tiki bar was constructed to serve their name-brand drinks. Cox modeled a long red gown, while the rest of the band was attired in modified black bullfighter getup complete with silver lame sashes. Cudahy filled between-song transitions with a poorly rehearsed comedy shtick that came off mechanical, full of intentionally cliched lines like “Don’t forget to tip your waitress.” The band’s performance–mostly faithful renditions of material from the album–was adequate if unspectacular. This sort of music was never designed to be exciting in performance; it was background fodder, mood music, the sound track to relaxed conversation.
