This process is broken. I don’t think it’s irretrievable or anything, but I’m also not terribly hopeful. Ideally, the record reviewer would exist in dialogue with the musician he’s writing about: he’d advance an interpretive claim, and she, in her own column, or her own medium, would respond to that claim. The writer can take a wider scope, and discuss the artist’s place within the subculture, or, if he’s reviewing a piece of mass entertainment, its role in the great national play of ideas. Or, if the reviewer didn’t feel like exerting the effort to make interpretive or argumentative claims, he might sink to the making of comparisons: i.e., Group X sounds like a cross between Patti Smyth’s Scandal and a perfect South Jersey spring day. Something silly like that doesn’t give the artist much latitude for response, but at least a threadbare one is imaginable. They want qualitative assessments, and they want them both so they can pad their presskits and so that they can have something to show momma. And I am deeply sympathetic, both to momma, who is wondering why in hell junior is spending so much time and money recording himself making an ungodly racket, and to the very real music-business need for qualitative assessments in presskits. I’m not a complete jerkoff; I want Group X to have gotten something useful out of my attempt to engage with their project. The trouble is that qualitative assessments are stupid. Critically speaking, they’re a total waste of time – they don’t tell you anything other than that a particular reviewer got a bang out of a particular record on one particular day. Why anybody should care has always been beyond me, and I shake my head in speechless wonder at how and why publications like Magnet bother to churn out qualitative assessment after decontextualized qualitative assessment, stuffing presskits like a donut machine pumping jelly into pastries. Then there’s the unfortunate fact that qualitative assessments tend to parrot and reinforce prevailing biases and prejudices. Examine, for instance, the All-Music Guide’s massive project to assign a star rating to every album ever released; a mammoth undertaking which, whatever its intention, will only serve to reinforce the hegemony of the commonly-accepted rock story. The army of fat white guys writing the reviews and making the assessments have, unsurprisingly, managed to assign four and a half stars to Professor Griff and Ms. Melodie, while damning De La Soul Is Dead by comparison, and have further determined that Headhunter by Krokus merits a better rating than Carole King’s Writer. Multiply this deadly cocktail of ignorance and lazy conventional wisdom by tens of thousands of albums, and you begin to see the trouble with broad qualitative assessments. Ultimately, one man’s opinion is dependent on the man, and the man is too often wholly dependent on the bigger man’s opinion. Of course there are always gadflies like me, nuts who follow a compass swaying to the demands of what seems to be an entirely unearthly magnetism, but that poses a problem no less knotty than that of the slavish follower of convention. That the Negatones satisfy all of my aesthetic criteria for "great" music is something I’ve made no bones about broadcasting, but then I’ve publicly advanced the same for the likes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Death By Chocolate, so thinking that my cheerleading alone will convince anybody to share my conviction is perhaps childish. As a matter of fact, the Negatones themselves have made that claim on several occasions. As a fan first, a fan who’s had the immense pleasure of being present at countless Negatones performances, my inclination is to drop any desire to write a detached, wide-scope article on them and instead rave about their virtues. See what I’m getting at? Like everybody else writing about music, despite my better judgement, I’m tugged in the direction of qualitative assessment by my own enthusiasm for the form and my desire to please the band. So what’s a rock writer to do? The industry wants associative assessments, so they can compare Group X to Nirvana, and sell it, hypothetically, to Nirvana fans still pissed off that they didn’t get a follow-up to In Utero. Group X wants a five-star rave, so they can chuck another entry in their presskit. I loathe presskits, but my distaste isn’t going to chase them away any more than my disdain for associative assessments will dispel the publicist’s need to market her releases by association. To ignore these realities is to be an irresponsible reviewer. Yet if the reviewer is slave to the publicist and the presskit, we might as well give up entirely on encouraging discourse between artists and teasing out significance and cultural meaning and go ahead and join the advertising industry. That may be satisfactory for those at Pulse, but it’s not going to work for me. A record review might need to conform to the music-industrial requirement for qualitative and associative judgement, but it should aspire to correlative, interpretive, and sociocultural assessments as well. Let’s see how that might work for the Negatones and their Heavy EP:

* Qualitative assessment: The Negatones ROCK! Well, now you think I’m being sarcastic, but no, really, they do. This is about as good a rock band as you can possibly ask for. Their experimentation with form and integration of electronic elements are simultaneously courageous and stylish, and they have the instrumental skill to successfully harmonize their prog-rock ambitions with their very infectious sense of humor. Justin Braun is an absolute rock on bass guitar, underpinning these songs with sturdy precision, and providing a launching pad for Jun Takeshi’s stratospheric leads. Jesse Wallace rolls and staggers, thundering behind the band like a wrecking ball. The songs take odd twists, pile huge and demented riffs upon a superstructure of twisted steel rhythm playing, drive through dark lyrical tunnels, arrive at secret bunkers in the heart of the city. Gigantic elastic bands of guitar snap and bend with vicious twangs, the amphetamine roar of treble suffuses J Braun’s relentless yelp, the words come in a torrent, like a hard rain on a tin roof. This is rock majesty -- undeniable, royal, crazy, angry as a deposed prince, amusing as his scheming jester.

* Associative assessment: If the Foo Fighters stuck their fingers in wet sockets and added xylophone and as much fucked-up old electronic equipment they could get their hands on. If Rush had a sense of humor, if King Crimson had a sense of history, if the Police were created twenty years later and were forced to respond to grunge. If the Soft Machine got hard, if Adrian Belew got blown, if Peter Hammill got hammered, if David Byrne got burned and Talking Heads shut up and played. If Kurt Cobain met Chrissie Hynde in the back of a convenience store, and all the security cameras went dead. If William Gibson and C.J. Cherryh had a rock band. If Michael Moorcock had a rock band (other than Deep Purple, I mean). Late Batman comics, trash television, late night infomercials for indescribable products, anime, hypertext, the Tacoma-Narrows bridge.

* Sociocultural assessment: In a borough filled with rock bands attempting to chase money and tailor their sound to the whims of passing A&R people, the Negatones walk the edge. They do so at shows and on record, teetering on the brink of chaotic collapse, pushing pop songs to the bursting point, wildly adding elements in the teeth of the current fashion for subtraction and minimalism. And they do so at their own risk, remaining aloof, paranoid and self-sufficient, choice by reluctant choice. Most, in their position and with professional ambitions, would make a few amendments to their sound; strip away some of the density to create something more inhabitable. The Braun brothers know but refuse to compromise. These guys are from Westchester; they’re working with a certain sense of entitlement. They demand that the world come to them. There’s a perfectionism working here that’s uncommon among Brooklyn artists. The Heavy EP – currently the only Negatones recording available – runs a scant ten minutes; five tracks, one instrumental. This from a group with an impressive catalog, this from a group with their own operational and reputable studio. No shortage of material, only a shortage of patience and an extremely zealous editing policy. The Braun brothers would sooner throw themselves out of their own club than settle for error or padding. Every second is made to count; everything else has been scraped into the trash can. In a borough filled with ersatz egalitarians whose records are stuffed to overflow with reiterative tracks, this gang of elitists and atavists have the temerity to pare down their interaction with the public to the handful of tracks that pass the highest inspection, and to make it painfully clear they are ready and willing to pare themselves down to nonexistence if that is what’s necessary to satisfy their unceasing demands for quality control. Not for nothing are they called the Negatones.

* Interpretive assessment: J Braun speaks out, in the grand tradition of ironists and satirists throughout literary history, against dilettantism. He is paranoid, conspiracy-minded, and frequently defensive, but he keeps it together well enough to deliver his broadsides against feigned interest, phony engagement, and anybody he deems too tentative to take a genuine stand. " You seem to have a lot of questions for somebody who isn’t looking for answers," he spits in "Thin Automation," just before the band brings the hammer down in a devastating crunch of electric guitar and carousel organ. Braun goes on to clarify: the contempt is not necessarily for the addressee’s hypocrisy or even her feigned cluelessness, but rather for her half-assed desire to open subjects she has no intention of investigating in earnest. " Tape Machines," a minute and a half outburst of hilarious venom complete with the most derisive-sounding xylophone this side of the Violent Femmes, pillories the democratization of NYC recording culture, and casts it as a metaphor for a general lowering of standards and a pandemic lack of rigor and commitment. "Everybody jumps to the extremes/everybody’s got a tape machine/everybody’s charging money and they think it’s funny/it’s exactly what it seems." Braun can countenance the sloppy product (at times); what he can’t put up with is the conceit that the machine owners are treating their projects – and, by extension, the rock enterprise – with the requisite gravity when it’s readily apparent to him they aren’t. "Everybody does the best they could/everybody hopes it’ll turn out good." When his peers are unwilling to pay close enough attention to see what, to him, is an evident absence of seriousness, he becomes frustrated, and that frustration leads inexorably to a feeling of besiegement. Possessor of one of the more fruitful Star Wars obsessions in rock, Braun turns the fate of Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back into a frightening metaphor for imposed stasis and betrayal. Over a monstrous riff – supplied with freakish muscularity by brother Justin – Braun spills out the story of his own alienation in the terrifying "Carbon Freeze": "When you’re cash poor and under the weight/and those who could save you arrive too late/and even if you’re on the lease/someone else has got the keys." Trusting no one, let down by their compatriots who are "driving down the road with no lights," the Negatones are the sound of the car careening off the highway – because nobody is at the wheel, and, struggling from the backseat, it keeps slipping out of Braun’s grasping fingers.

* Correlative assessment: What place does this group have in the modern Brooklyn underground; these rock and roll astronauts who reject so many of the conventions that define Williamsburg music? In a borough that wears minimalism as a badge, the Negatones revel in overdub-happy maximalism; where it is fashionable to follow MC5 and garage rock, the Braun brothers cling to their Rush records with unflinching loyalty. While slapdash record-making on fetishized analog media has become the norm, The Heavy EP sounds hyper-processed, fretted over, defiantly digital. Can they find their archetype and fit in the growing mythology of Brooklyn music? Well, if Mooney Suzuki are Arthur, direct and perhaps a little willfully slow-witted, the Negatones are Merlin, conjuring magic behind the throne, moving backward through history, arraying wit and wisdom to produce effects of astonishing force. If Oneida is Zeus, virile, commanding, hurling thunderbolts from atop the clouds, the Negatones are Hephaestus, ugly, hunted, huddled beneath a smoking mountain, forging tools of massive power, ennobled by the dignity of the workshop. (Umm… how far can I take this?) Er…if Longwave are Odin, majestic, a bit righteous, powerful but too classy to be as pugnacious as their peers, the Negatones are Loki, mischievous, caustic, phenomenally daring, fired by schemes and plans. If the Strokes are the dangerous Ishtar, the Negatones are Marduk, lord of the city, home to the creative and destructive power of ingenuity and technology. The Negatones are every mythological figure that was cast off the mountain and found power not by courtesy of the mysteries of the divine, but by twisting the implements of the built environment to purposes of which the gods never dreamed.