Scaterd-Few - Grandmother's Spaceship
The first time I ever heard Allan Aguirre's tremulous tenor scaling the heights of Scaterd-Few's debut single "Kill The Sarx" was on one of those old Hot Metal Summer tapes. It was a shock to say the least, coming as it did after the frenetic finger picking of Ken Tamplin, confounding categorization and stupefying with liberal usage of the Greek word for flesh and hyperactive commands to "hang it from the rafters." I remember listening to that cassette with my friend Don, both of us puzzled and a bit spooked by the urgency and intensity contained within that one minute, twenty-five seconds of sound. Allan Aguirre stood out. At a time when most people were writing about 'rocking for the Rock', Aguirre was writing about gangbangs and the dangers of freebasing. When hairsprayed locks and pink spandex were still required outfitting for rock bands, Aguirre was sporting dreadlocks and going topless. So it should come as little surprise that now, almost a decade after "Kill the Sarx" first erupted from the bass tubes of church bound minivans across the country, at a time when it seems that some believers are actually mounting a campaign to brand aliens as demons in disguise, Allan Aguirre is releasing a record that has more to do with space creatures than any given Roger Corman film.
Grandmother's Spaceship is Aguirre's third full-length outing with Scaterd-Few (not counting the outtakes and oddities compendium Out of the Attic), and could well be the band's most cohesive yet. The website is adorned with pictures of spacecraft, an alien family frolicking beneath a too-blue sky, all serving to complement the multitude of references to alien life woven throughout the record's 14 songs.
"Musically, you can expect what everyone's been anticipating since the release of Sin Disease," says Aguirre. "Sin Disease 2." Aguirre's tongue is planted firmly in his cheek when he says this, though much of Grandmother's Spaceship does hearken back to what made the band's debut such a revelation. "It's hard punk, funk, reggae, and futuristic, with angst, realism, psychedelia... predominately a 'punk rock' record. Very aggressive. How would an album titled Grandmother's Spaceship go over in the alternative Christian market when Christians are being told by many that aliens are demons -- which, in my opinion, has no Scriptural foundation? The title was too cool, so I went with it. The alien pictures and images on the CD are probably going to offend the religious right. Oh well. Jesus offended the religious right, too."
Though Aguirre remains convinced that the album packaging will send a twister through the trailer park of religious rock ("I have never had such controversial artwork" he admits, seeming oddly serene about the whole situation) the lyrics he has crafted are perhaps his most direct and accessible. Grandmother's Spaceship finds Aguirre returning to the role of 20th Century Prophet, the voice of one crying aloud in a wilderness of automatons where the ghost has become lost in the machine and, to quote "Space Junk": "Major Tom is now an info monk."
"Because of the 'punk rock' element, a more aggressive me surfaces" Aguirre explains. "This is the aggressive, doomsday, in your face, 'the end is near WAKE UP!' type of Allan."
The record was assembled over a 2-year period. Aguirre wrote four of the songs when he was negotiating a Scaterd-Few release with Tooth & Nail. When the label passed on the offer, Aguirre devoted his attention to Spyglass Blue, his post-punk, nearly goth side project. When Jackson/Rubio expressed interest in the band, guitarist Russell Archer relocated to Dallas to help Aguirre get Scaterd-Few off the ground. Archer and Aguirre fine tuned 14 songs over the course of 3 weeks, arranging and re-arranging the numbers through what Aguirre jokingly calls "The ACME Scaterd-Few filtering machine." The demos were mailed to drummer Steve Martens and bassist Steve Meigs, who arrived in Dallas shortly thereafter to record the material. Though Grandmother's Spaceship is not a rock opera, all of the issues Aguirre tackles on the record seem tailored to fit its supernatural title. "I had a song called 'Grandmother's Spaceship (Bobby's Song)', based on a story I was told by a guy who claimed that his grandmother had been visited by aliens who promised deliverance and salvation for her and her family from the world's end. As funny as the story was, it was also quite sad. Do you realize the number of people that claim their salvation through aliens, or God in a spaceship?" As Aguirre began his traditional dissection of our 20th Century vices, he discovered that all of them could be painted with the colors of science fiction. At the heart of Grandmother's Spaceship is the image of the human race at the close of the millennium: confused, frantic, and alienated from each other and their Creator.
"One man, years ago, who claimed to have had alien encounters in Northern Europe said that the aliens had told him that the cause of man's demise would be his inability to progress at the same rate spiritually as he did technologically. We alienated ourselves from the Father in the Garden. That alienation in turn, alienated us from our original state as a species -- immortals. We are not in our original, natural state. This fuels our need to seek a means to overcome our alienation, hence the need for a 'supreme being.' A 'comforter'". On Grandmother's Spaceship, humans become "Species filled with anti-matter."
"You'd better purge your cache and wait/before you download a virus-status: terminate/...you'd better get your signals straight."
"At the turn of the century, man gets all wacked out." Aguirre brusquely declares. "Man starts getting very 'pagan'. It's his nature to do so. He just doesn't properly know how to direct this energy, this need. A couple of years ago an artist in Holland and his wife got into their car, started it up, started driving down the road, heard a weird sound under the dash and had their lower torsos blown up by a bomb planted by one of the victim's contemporaries as a performance piece. Another artist filmed the whole thing, and shows his 'art' -- the film footage he shot -- at underground art houses. Another artist sculpted his own head out of 8 pints of his own blood. These are disturbing things. Man starts looking for identity and becomes very pagan in the process."
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