CDVS: A Perfect Circle Vs. Circle Jerks

After an earful of A Perfect Circle's Emotive, a tiresomely bleak anti-war album released on--you guessed it--Election Day, it's a bit easier to sympathize with all that right-wing bluster about entertainers ain't paid to do all that goldarn pontificatin' and opinionatin' and dadgum it just entertain us awreddy! It's as though this bunker buster of protest songs by John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell and other luminaries on the long list tucked under John Ashcroft's pillow have been run through a filter of some ego's overarching, self-involved anomie.

Who's ego? Maynard James Keenan's, of course. "Imagine" has been reduced to a pained whimper; Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" is rendered as an airless reverie. A Perfect Circle leadman Keenan has essentially taken what could have been a great anti-war compilation album--a bag of ragged lightning bolts of rage and fright--and pushed them through the mulcher of his own equalizing angst, mangling each song with his own dreary moral vision until what comes out is yet another moody, atmospheric musical sob sesh about the evils of war. Depeche Mode's "People Are People" is drained of its humanity and refilled with a gooey placebo of wounded outrage; "Peace Love and Understanding" is drained of its exuberance and refilled with, well, more gooey placebo of wounded outrage. Somewhere along the line, artistic enterprise metastasized into artsy arrogance. Maybe the revolution is over, 'cause you certainly can't dance to this.

Ah, bring back the reckless drunkarchy of the Circle Jerks, whose 1985 album Wonderful, ironically, takes a similar tack, equalizing spiritual malaise not through synth and digital drumkit but a mode of snappy punk gunfire that was approachable in its utter mediocrity. The Circle Jerks always had a way of reducing punk's restless energies to the sound of jogging stupidly in place--after all, what's moshing but the punk version of one hand clapping? If A Perfect Circle's egotism is criminal, the fact that the Circle Jerks' "Wonderful," "American Heavy Metal Weekend" and "Making the Bombs" are all iterations of the same song is a mere misdemeanor to be laughed off. And whaddya mean the Circle Jerks aren't deep? They can do anti-war. It's called "Killing for Jesus," dude. Sheesh.--Andrew Kiraly