The 1980 Listening Post - The 49 Americans - E Pluribus Unum

 Reviewed by Jim Coursey

Released: 1980 The 49 Americans E Pluribus Unum Genre: 20+ Jazz Punk Not-So-Greats Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Highlights: Beat Up Russians That Man Should Be More Ideal The Musical: I Don’t Want (Royal Children) “My buddy set up a recording studio in his kitchen. You bring the horns, I’ll bring the guitar. He’s got the piano, spoons and pots.” Well, at least that’s how I imagine disc 1 of “E Pluribus Unum” went down. If 1982’s “We Know Nonsense” was playful, amateurish, and hard to pin down, this album sounds like the rehearsal. It’s what the likes of Andrew "Giblet" Brenner, David Toop, Steve Beresford, Max Eastley, Lol Coxhill and Peter Cusack, Viv Albertine, and Vivien Goldman do when they are bored. “E Pluribus Unum” is not a bad listen, and I have a soft spot for this kind of project, but it wears thin fast. The music fully embraces punk’s anarchic DIY-ism while ignoring its anger or instrumentation. While you get the sense some people can play their instruments, there’s a lot of beginner horn work here. At its best it sounds like demos for a jazz band, and at worst it sounds like someone pressed record while they were learning to play a song – “Sounds Like Ska” sure reminds me of someone aimlessly riffing on pieces of Wall of Voodoo’s “Dark Continent” for example. The lyrics are generally the best of it – often sarcastic, such as the faux patriotism of “Beat Up Russians” to the “mistakes were made” blame-shifting of “That Man.” Whatever one thinks of disc one, disc two is simply not worth listening to. A recording of a musical, it sounds like someone staged a play in a large parlor and placed a single mic at the far end from most of the action, and then didn’t bother to adjust the levels as sound sources go from closer to farther to closer again. It’s like the auditory equivalent of rifling through a few rolls of bad, grainy Kodak disc photos, you clearly had to be there to make anything out of this one. The only nominally well recorded component is the narration, which isn’t saying much – “well I can’t tell where you are but the digital date stamp on those photos is clear.” The only enjoyable moment for me was the very short ditty “I Don’t Want (Royal Children)”, in which some young princes and princesses sing about not wanting to be “et” by dragons. The rest was a wash, and I tried to pretend it didn’t exist or were merely “bonus tracks” when I rated the album.