THE INTELLIGENCE
Lil’ Peril
Mt.St.Mtn.
2022
Lars Finberg, confirmed genius guy and poet laureate of sunken 21st century Rock, acts as manager in perpetuity of THE INTELLIGENCE, primary vehicle for his prolific creative swirl and a project that has taken on new shapes across myriad trials and shifts. The project began in his Seattle bedroom – a lad and his Tascam cassette 8 track – with the classic Boredom & Terror and has now landed in his Los Angeles studio apartment – an urchin and his Tascam digital 12 track – with Lil’ Peril, a new album that finds Finberg 1000% back at the controls. Over the course of 11 albums (!), The Intelligence has established a backbone that boogies through revolutions, allowing each jam-crammed dispatch to feel and sound admirably unique. The angular sharp shocks heard in earlier years have steadily evolved into the ballooning grooves heard on more recent releases (including Finberg’s recent solo work). Lil’ Peril is a dreamy gamble that captures this current bubbling penchant in The Intelligence’s inaugural homemade mode.
With inspirational templates as far-flung as LES PAUL & MARY FORD, THE SPECIALS, LEE PERRY and THE SPITS, Lil’ Peril pulls off the absurd shift “from ‘No-Wave SANTANA’ to ‘SCREAMERS recorded by JON BRION’”. Playing shoulder parrot to studio engineers has no doubt informed Finberg’s approach to home recording, specifically in how much further he can go without wincing budget-minded eyes staring him down. This is immediately sensed on the opener “Maudlin Agency,” which begins with canned minimal bleep and closes with a full recreation of the “Brass Monkey” hook (Saxophone throughout by Mikal Cronin). These surprise-attack conclusions are a running current throughout the Lil’ Peril’s program and demonstrates that the main lesson Finberg has learned in The Intelligence is to never reel it in. Centerpiece banger “My Work Here Is Dumb” ranks among the finest Intelligence moments existent and an apex in Finberg’s songcraft, boasting a bonkers arrangement and a thematic gnaw that is both brutal and playful. The collection closes with the epic “Soundguys,” a suite cut-up that fuses CAN and STEELY DAN into one of the most dastardly tunes available for consumption in the plague age. As Finberg himself states, “They may say this is ‘lo-fi’, but I say it’s ‘no-CGI’”.
“The band disintegrated, so it devolved back to the core idea: if I do every aspect, it’s indestructible.” 20 years on and Finberg has finally let everyone know what The Intelligence actually means! All those wily experiments and warm flubs have come back full circle and the shit’s pure goddamn gold. Proof positive that there is always some sort of cute trouble, farcical tragedy and Lil’ Peril at play with The Intelligence.
LARS FINBERG
TINNITUS TONIGHT
MT. ST. MTN. / VAPID MOONLIGHTING INC.
2020
Tinnitus Tonight is the latest & sneakiest full-measure serving from LARS FINBERG, world-class bon vivant and prolific Panic Rock artiste.Why so sneaky?Here’s the dirt:Finberg developed a nerve rash leading up his 2017 tootle, the TY SEGALL-assisted Moonlight Over Bakersfield. Rather than blindly leap from the comfy zone, he tip-toed in secret to a friendly but far-flung (cough*Sacramento*cough) studio to capture a reserve of slanted tunes with a proven-effective team of buds.Those comrades — the glorious LAUREN MARIE MIKUS on keys, frequent collaborator & forever-gent KAANAN TUPPER on drums and, at the controls and elsewhere, the indestructible CHRIS WOODHOUSE — all fostered a supportive framework that first allowed Finberg to “think” beyond THE INTELLIGENCE, gearing him up for a life in the spotlight (or moonlight, as it were).So yes indeed:what appears to be an adventurous follow-up also doubles as a prequel.Keep accurate score or you’re dusted.
The core of Tinnitus Tonight centers on an assemblage of Finberg’s most golden riffs –- trash-coustic but driftwood-smooth, naughty and infinite, all of ‘em bangers and/or buggers.Tunes sprout and move matador-like until an inevitable goring.The past-it grunt that kicks off “Burger Queen” prompts a mimed chef’s kiss.“My Prison” and “The Doors” are quintessential, truly distilled Finberg moments, compounding his trademark acerbic, out-for-blood wit with these absurdly cool, whip-crack guitars. The massively impressive “Public Admirer” is unequivocally the loudest, most damaged blurt from this doggie in at least a decade.In total, Tinnitus Tonight is a wonderful and welcome reminder that our guy is a very real rouser and a vital, unique purveyor of artful aggression, playful and powerful.
Finberg beams really fuckin’ brightly under his own name, perhaps more so than with any group orchestration he happens to be braising with.Do these higher personal stakes call for a dastardlier delivery?Maybe this permeating 2020 End Times feeling prohibits the normal corralling of the subconscious mind?Whatever the answers are, you will find them here.
THE INTELLIGENCE
Un-Psychedelic in Peavey City
Vapid Moonlighting Inc.
2019
Still panting from their installment in CASTLE FACE’s Live In San Francisco series (where they ran a greatest hits clinic for basement sweat-rats) and from mega-mind LARS FINBERG’s outside solo oddballer, Moonlight Over Bakersfield, THE INTELLIGENCE return in nouveau mode with Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City, their 10th studio album-amalgam released on their own imprint “Vapid Moonlighting Inc”. Load up on electrolytes, all ye who enter here…
The customary tin/aluminum milestone won’t fit this true band of steel: the current Intelligence iteration is most forceful and dynamic of any line-up in the project’s history. Although each performer has been smeared across myriad recordings and tours for years, the now-time assemblage of DREW CHURCH (bass), DAVE HERNANDEZ (guitar) and KAANAN TUPPER (drums) currently positions The Intelligence as a world-class unit, with members playing in partnership with conductor Finberg rather than at his sometimes-service. Lars is giving the back-rubs now, not getting ‘em — a delightful & cruel twist.
There’s no aspect of Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City that tilts toward phoned-in safe plays, no easy feat for a 10-albums-deep unit. For this collection, the band cast off the comforts of their traditional cosmopolitan haunts (Sacramento, Costa Mesa, etc.) in favor Grass Valley’s Louder Studios, a wilderness recording burg (OK OK, with a pool, yes) helmed by TIM GREEN, a twiddler maestro who has assisted BIKINI KILL, MELVINS, COMETS ON FIRE, WAND and countless others in sterling fashion. The resultant recordings are the most expansive Intelligence material imaginable — perhaps Un-Psychedelic, but certainly free, playfully abstract and awesomely stretched out.
In both arrangement and performance, The Intelligence sound more substantial than ever, rhythmically deeper, largely trading their punky bread-and-butter whip-cracks for something furrier and more adventurous. “Auteur Detour” (a confirmed studio after-thought deemed by the band as a “No-Wave Santana” exercise!) prompts head-smacking in terms of the sounds being chased — you’ll wonder how they managed to catch ‘em and why it works so wonderfully. The familiarity of “Mute Me” — snake-surf guitars exploding and retreating, with Finberg gnashing against perceptions of his own oeuvre — is uncloaked and infinitely more severe take than keen followers could be prepared for. “Immolationin’” turns all manner of earthly malaise into sea-breeze soul-flow, closing the album somewhere between hope and end-times resignation.
A tune for our times if there ever was one. Un-Psychedelic perfectly captures a new Intelligence: nearly re-born, entirely invigorated, free from wet heaving, ruling Peavey City.
Mitch Cardwell
Soggy Encampment, CA
Up-To-Late-2018
LARS FINBERG
MOONLIGHT OVER BAKERFIELD
IN THE RED RECORDS
2017
Deep breath: It’s been nearly 20 years of high marks Mr. Lars Aldric Finberg, shocking as that calculation may be to make. Be it as basher in A-FRAMES and THEE OH SEES, secret weapon of WOUNDED LION, architect of PUBERTY and administrator of THE INTELLIGENCE, his whirlwind presence has been a reliable one; that of an artist that people look for and look toward. With outlets as varied (be they casual or all-consuming) as this, what oh what then prompted the emergence of a solo offering? In truth, it was In The Red’s outta-nowhere green-lighting of the concept that sent Finberg’s brain bubbling toward Moonlight Over Bakersfield, a statement of entirely his own concoction…A truly swirling step from a guy that’s always movin’ diagonally.
Followers of Finberg’s recording history will immediately detect a plume of confidence around Moonlight Over Bakersfield, an air that each successive offering has inched toward but now, at long last, has taken full bloom. It’s legitimately wonderful to witness Lars ordering off the top shelf across every aspect of the album, recognizing this as a collection of experiments and bangers deserving of such treatment. This assuredness carries over thematically, with Finberg tackling both personal and political obsessions with equal honesty and sophistication.
His lone messaging when providing the album for perusal? “I got a little bit weird on this one.” And how: a wrong-made-right cross fade opens “Permanent Prowl”, a personal status update wherein nylon acoustic simplicity mutates toward alien discotheque raunch. The elite and original cleanliness to the rhythms on the album, where lows frequently become high (“Bass IS a guitar, after all!”), creates a total inversion of the Manc-born post-punkisms that have informed so much of his prior pop-craft. In fact, there’s a shocking amount of 90s industrial residue in tunes like “Isle Of Lucy”, an unexpected and completely winning addition to Finberg’s trick bag. The centerpiece of “Myopic Blue Heaven” is artificial Intelligence, a reimagining of the bedroom beginnings of “Boredom And Terror”, replacing any human charm with robot junk. It makes you think that this is what he’s been chasing after all along. The dangerous distortion bleed of “Ambiverts” forges what feels like the album’s epic: a speaker-ruiner with refrains that somehow never waver.
The favors called in for this occasion serve only as to bolster the offering as a whole. Frequent and trusted collaborators, including drummer Kaanan Tupper of COUNTRY TEASERS and THE INTELLIGENCE, now stew with notable heavies from LA LUZ and MELVINS / BIG BUSINESS, creating Finberg’s Whole New Sound. The great MIKAL CRONIN even guests on sax, offering sophisticated bleat as needed. It’s TY SEGALL that serves as Finberg’s main ally though, both at the controls and in performance. Previous valiant attempts aside, Moonlight Over Bakersfield marks Segall’s first truly great achievement as producer/engineer, as if a partnership with Finberg would result in anything less.
Veiled hints at future L.A.F. riots are already coming in, so waste no time in hearing Moonlight Over Bakersfield. Lifestyle Plopping — Into The Gap!
Mitch Cardwell Summertime, 2017
