Fine China

Item: You Make Me Hate Music
Author: Dr. Bruce L. Thiessen

You Make Me Hate Music

(2002)

Reviewed by Dr. Bruce L. Thiessen

Discogs Apple Music TIDAL Spotify

Label Tooth & Nail RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2002

acoustic rock dream pop indie pop synth pop

Facing a Bull In Fine China

All too often a critic will act like a bull in a china shop, recklessly tearing up everything in harm's way. Yet on the other hand, to borrow an album title from 70s Canadian rock band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, a good band is "Not Fragile." A good band must be prepared to take on any bull, just like the one that recently trampled Lyle Lovett, as he was heroically saving the life of a dear uncle.

Let's begin with the title, You Make Me Hate Music. "Make" is a strong word. Most psychologists would argue that nobody possesses the power to make you feel anything. We choose what we feel and how to respond to the provocation of others.

"Hate" is an even stronger word. It conjures up anger, even rage. So why is a nice Christian band whose members worship a God of love expressing an unseemly sentiment like hate? How can a band whose identity is wrapped up in every single note on the musical scale harbor a surreptitious disdain for the very art form that sustains them? Wouldn't this cause an inner sense of fragmentation and an irreparable implosion of collective identity among members of Fine China?

One expects to discover such a shattered-glass scenario, but if you listen to the CD, you will find the band reflecting a characterological consistency--one that could only come from a band who knows who they are and why they are creating and performing music.

The concept behind this concept album is indeed a mystery, but mystery is what makes music good. Paradox and the tension of opposites are what engage the mind and the emotions in a great musical work. "Day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil, introversion (inner directedness) and extraversion (outer-directedness), consciousness and unconsciousness, thinking and feeling," and yes, "love and hate." These are all Jungian examples of the "complex of inexorable opposites," examples that are dramatically illustrated and serve as recurrent themes in You Make Me Hate Music. Yet it is the simple manner in which these opposites and concomitant tensions are expressed in You Make Me Hate Music that makes this album so appealing. It is the country, folksy lyrical style of Rob Withem, Fine China's lead singer, guitarist and songwriter that makes it accessible despite its complex psychological content. Though he is no Paul Simon, John Lennon or John McCrea, his lyrics carry a certain elegant profundity reflected in simple chapters, moments and even broken fragments of life stories.

Much to my chagrin, many of my esteemed colleagues--the ones who are overly saturated in Jungian methods of literary and art criticism, would enter You Make Me Hate Music with the same heedlessness as those bulls in a china shop. I can almost hear them now. Some may even go so far as to suggest that the album be re-titled You Make Me Hate My Anima, ill-conceivedly suggesting that a less than perfect relationship with his mother during childhood has caused Withem to look upon the female archetype within himself with a burgeoning sense of contempt.

As an alternative to all the psychobabble, let's try a literal interpretation of this album on and see how it fits. The public is slowly saying, " Bye, Bye, Bye!" to boy bands and Britney Spears. Could it be that this phenomenon helped to fuel the lyrics to the title track, in which Fine China proclaim, "I hate music too/I hate the bands and every song they do." In the words of Cake frontman John McCrea (tunefully uttered on Fashion Nugget) "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps!" As for now, I'm not going to rush to judgment. I'm simply going to end the therapy session I'm supposed to be having with the patient who has long since fallen asleep on my Freudian couch. Then I'm going to kick back and listen to You Make Me Hate Music.

Hey all you bulls out there, "shake, rattle, and roll" all you want. Hammer away, but "You Can't Touch This." Hearts can be broken, but Fine China just won't break. Tight rhythms, refreshingly bouncy, melodic arrangements, deeper-than-meets-the-ear-lyrics and that Strokes-like retro rock feel make this china unbreakable. Look at the Strokesesque devil-may-care haircuts redolent of early Beatles and Stones. Listen to the decidedly non-preachy, tastefully and tactfully delivered devil-may-not-care-but-Jesus-does attitude. Could this be the first Christian rock band to become a part of what I've admittedly prematurely labeled The New Ameri-brit Invasion? That may be stretching things a bit, but I don't want to say, "I told you so" if things turn out that way. Or do I? In any case, I have one final comment. Fine China, you make me want to love your music, and now, thanks to your delicious disc dish, my want has turned to will.

4 tocks