UNHOLY MATRIMONY
(Or How to Run A Band From Gmail Without Even Trying)

Anyone familiar with Mastodon’s viscous, inky sludge metal will know it is as heavy as it is labyrinthine. Anyone familiar with At the Drive In will know intimately its ornate, lacerating rhythms. And everyone who loves Queens of the Stone Age will know too well how consuming their expansive motifs and deceptively complex arrangements are. So many a high fives were surely slapped, beer bottles clinked and joints charitably passed in subterranean bedrooms all over the nation when it was announced this week that Tony Hajjar (ATDI) Troy Sanders (Mastodon) and Troy Van Leeuwen (QOTSA) were weaving their shared love for distorted guitars, intricate time signatures and score music into a single musical entity—Gone Is Gone.

More Than Just a Handful of Expensive Parts

But supergroups seem to form in the way crop circles do - they're either otherworldly and transcendent or just a farmer's crop that hasn't been doing it so well and has been turned back into fallow land. It's usually the latter, but we never seem to stop hoping for something more.

What is exciting about projects like Gone Is Gone that our possibility ceiling is elevated - the constituent band members aren't just algorithmically selected based on how they look on paper, and they're not just a Jacuzzi full of famous friends. There’s a kind of encapsulating purity in their union. By this I mean their respective bands overlap in a meaningful way, so for fans of this musical realm, Gone Is Gone looks likely to capture the spirit of this music at full wingspan. But nothing is certain. Successful collaborations are more than just a handful of expensive parts, they're a perfect creative storm that converges upon the right subject with the right people at the right time.

The Perfect Storm

"I think it's wonderful, I think he's wonderful. And I think it's wonderfully timed" said CeeLo Green of his collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, Adrian Younge and A Tribe Called Quest's Ali Shaheed Muhammad - 'Untitled 06'. The song, passing through 12 iterations and four songwriters, moved from composer Younge (responsible for the impeccable vintage production and instrumentation) to Shaheed Muhammad (responsible for the song's bossa nova swing). Then came CeeLo's voice unrolling like fresh silk over the mix and finally Kendrick Lamar who, according to CeeLo, "finished the thought". The result is close to miraculous, it sounds the way very expensive linen feels.

Jacuzzi Pals

The recent and obvious contrast to this perfect storm of creativity seems to be Drake's 'Pop Style' which features the Throne (Kanye and Jay Z) and seems like the creative stump to Untitled 06's voluminously branching tree. Jay Z utters 18 words. Kanye slurs more but offers about the same. Unlike the CeeLo/Kendrick/Younge/Shaheed Muhammad collab, there is no evolution of thought spreading through the song's contributors. They are that Jacuzzi of famous pals, using their household names as a kind of personal mint. And unsurprisingly, it's not exactly scintillating. But it's not alone either. Further bedtime listening for insomniacs could just as easily include bands like Superheavy (Mick Jagger/Joss Stone/Damian Marley/Dave Stewart) Audioslave (Chris Cornell and Rage Against the Machine sans Zachary De La Rocha) and Freebass (the bassists from the Smiths/Joy Division/Stones Roses - sounds far cooler than it actually is).

Do Something Different

Arguably, one crucial difference between truly consummate collaborations and ones that appear to grow nowhere is self awareness. When the project truly subsumes personal profile in the mind of its progenitors, then beautiful things may grow. Before 1922, TS Eliot was a marginally successful writer working at a bank. Then he published The Wasteland, which became one of the most significant poetic works of the 20th Century and launched Eliot into the sphere of the literary greats. He's since been lionized by the likes of Bob Dylan and the beat poets of the 50s and 60s. But he didn't do it alone. Italian poet, genius, madman and unfortunately latent fascist Ezra Pound had such an influence on the shaping and editing of The Wasteland that it has often been referred to as a co-creation. And Pound, despite his poetic acumen and reputation, lost himself in the task, saw Eliot's potential and wanted him to "do something different."

Condemned To Be Free

Some of the greatest collaborators of all time collaborate in life as well as creative endeavors. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir - writers, thinkers and life partners were utterly eclipsed by their work, in fact the entire length of their 51 year marriage was a very public experiment in existential living, where the moral imperative and the meaning of humanity is derived from the individual rather than a god or scientific doctrine. They had an open marriage and accepted their chosen freedom as the daily hard work it sometimes was, emotionally, philosophically. According to Sartre we are all “condemned to be free" and one of the key elements of their living experiment and something reflected in their writings is the element of risk. They took no counsel in possession, in dogma. They risked pain and failure daily. Unlike the carefully chosen names of many supergroup members, vetted to maximize exposure and minimize financial risk, the true creative entity is existential. It welcomes risk rather than simply proceeding with the most profitable name they can think of, AC/DC

-Paul Cumming

Simile is a weekly series by Cool Accidents fave/regular Paul Cumming aka Wax Volcanic that unravels current moments in music and follows the threads to some strange and strangely familiar places.