Amor and Language

LP cover

CD cover

Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Hard on Through the Summer"	2:29
2.	"The Ballad of Younis and Sofia"	4:33
3.	"Luster"	2:21
4.	"Ai"	2:43
5.	"T (I, II)"	5:48
6.	"A-A-Allegories"	2:03
7.	"The Wind"	3:14
8.	"Stil de grain brun"	2:09
9.	"The Letter"	3:23

Background

Recorded in Chicago and Los Angeles

"it's sonics alarmed the pressing plant enough to wonder if there were imperfections in the master"

• 
  Poster

Personnel

Musicians

David Grubbs, George Hurley, John McEntire, Albert Oehlen, Jim O'Rourke, Stephen Prina, Mayo Thompson, Tom Watson

Artists, etc

Consuelo & Meme, Tricia Donnelly, John Elder, Margo Leavin, Steve Linn, Sharon Lockhart, Franz Schnaas

Cover art

• Rachel Williams - model
• Steven Wong - facilitator
• Christopher Williams - art director
• Alex Slade - photography

On the opposite side of the CD booklet, Williams is holding a copy of Gorki & Co. / 33 Songs.

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2010

MT: Rachel Williams, yeah. She very kindly did that shoot for us. An interesting dame.

LE: Was she a fan of the band?

MT: No. She’d never heard of us before, obviously. She’s a model, and an art historian of a kind. Formidable woman. Very powerful presence, and I was starting to say supermodel, but that’s a category. She’s very super, when I say ‘super,’ I mean that she really knows her business. Does all those poses that you see on there. You turn the camera on and she goes. Which is the opposite of me, you know, you get poses of me like that [covers his face]. I throw my hands in front of my face, I don’t wanna break anybody’s camera.

Reviews

Chicago Tribune

August 3, 1995

David Rothschild

There's nothing new about using sex to sell products, but there's something a tad ironic about the sight of supermodel Rachel Williams, semi-nude--on the back cover of The Red Krayola's new "Amor and Language" CD on Chicago's scrappy, independent Drag City label.

After wondering how Drag City pulled it off, on second and third glance, you discover that Williams is made to look as unglamorous and unsexy as possible, which clearly takes some doing. And you realize it's all a put-on.

At a party in Los Angeles earlier this year, The Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson was introduced to the model by a photographer friend, Christopher Williams (no relation). The photo shoot took place soon thereafter.

Had Thompson and the photographer been looking to sell more CDs, draping Williams like a corpse over what appears to be a garden weeding bench, dressed in army surplus pants and matching brassiere, definitely would not have been the ticket. So why waste a beautiful woman's time making her look like a G.I. Joanne blow-up doll?

"The whole thing is just completely ironic," says Drag City's Rian Murphy. "I would love to hear someone say--just because I'd know that I had a sucker then--that we were making some sort of sexist pay-off. It's got nothing to do with what it would seem at all."

Drag City is known for its deadpan, subversive leanings, and in the furthest realms of underground rock, it's often hard to tell what's intended to be funny and who the joke is on--or if all of mainstream culture is one long, running gag.

"It's warts and all on that particular spread," says Murphy.

"It's definitely a comment on the objectification of art and turning one thing into something else for profit. "

The musical charms of "Amor and Language"--sort of a cross between the Lovin' Spoonful and the Discovery Channel--will probably be lost on those who buy it for the faux cheesecake on the back cover. But consciousness-raising was never a big business--and isn't that ironic.

CMJ New Music Monthly

September 1995

Franklin Bruno

Mayo Thompson has got to be some kind of center of gravity for the off-center. Nobody else makes records with supermodel Rachel Williams as cover star, L.A. art dealer Margo Leavin in the credits, and members of Gastr del Sol, Overpass, Tortoise, and the faculty of Pasadena Art Center (not to mention German painter Albert Oehlen) on the grooves. So what does this cynosure of the cerebral wings of several disciplines sound like after 20-plus years of koloring outside the lines? An off-the-cuff art-rocker, concerned more with the play of ideas than their polished presentation. Most of this EP was recorded bass-ackwards, with a lined-in, untreated guitar and vocal (you can hear Mayo breathing off-mic fairly often) being laid down before such niceties as, say, a rhythm section. "AI" (Artificial Intelligence?) features not one, but two such after-the-fact drum tracks, with George Hurley and John McEntire playing separate parts (presumably without reference to each other) in each channel, operating independently in the manner of hemispheres of a divided brain. "T (I, II)" uses experimental results from cognitive sciences as the governing metaphor of a love lyric: "We were turning you over in our minds/at about 10 rpm.../a mental picture, a mental picture of you." And it even has a hook! But for everyone one of Thompson's connections the listener does "get," there's probably five s/he's missing. Why, for example, does "The Wind" suddenly quote "Moonlight Becomes You"? On this nine-song, 25-minute EP, the answers are less the point than the opportunity to observe a venturesome mind and his talented entourage.

The Root of Twinkle

Summer 1995

Joel

The slightly ridiculous cover of this new album by the Red Krayola makes me imagine a conversation in a local record store:

Grunge Dude #1: Whoa, that chick is hot!

Grunge Dude #2: Wow, like man, nice tits!

Dude #1: And she's got a belly ring too, dude! Coo-ull!

Dude #2: Man, you can see her nipples through that bra!

Dude #1: Awesome, I think I'll buy it!

Dude #2: Whoa dude, like, maybe you should hear it first. Why don't you ask the dweeb who works here about it?

Dude #1: O.K. Hey dude, does this record, like, suck?

Nerdy Record Store Employee: No, that album does not suck. It is the latest album by Mayo Thompson's Red Krayola, a band which started in Texas in the 1960s. Back then they explored truly psychedelic music that was ignored by even the hippie counterculture. Then Mayo moved to England, and the Red Krayola acquired a newer sound along with newer members, becoming a huge influence on the burgeoning punk/new wave aesthetic. Thompson even played with the legendary Pere Ubu, and he recorded a huge number of bands. Last year, Red Krayola reformed with Dave Grubbs on guitar, John McEntire on drums, Tom Watson on guitar, Jim O'Rourke on farfisa, and various others. I saw them play with George Hurley of the Minutemen on drums and it was amazing! This new record is an essential purchase.

Dude #1: Huh? Whatever dude.

Dude #2: Forget it. Let's buy the new Pearl Jam...

Which is to say, one should not judge a record by its cover. The new Red Krayola LP is a superb effort by Mayo Thompson et al. But don't expect anyone else to understand it at all, much less understand it yourself.

Staten Island Advance

October 15, 1995

Idio-Audio

1995

[...] By saying that this is the sell-out album I do not mean that the band (read as Mayo Thompson, he’s the only constant member) have compromised their quarter century old musical style (read as late sixties new wave a la Beefheart) or that Mayo is now writing the type of mindless lyrics that one has come to expect from popularist (read as business) music. Infact Mayo’s lyrical bent (I’ve come to call it dialectical idealism) works so well with the current line up that you’d think they were his original band (one of the many pro-situ features of the band is that it’s members are stolen from whatever record label Mayo is recording with, helping to break down the hegemony of product fetishism and the ideal of groupism). It’s the cover of AMOR AND LANGUAGE that makes this album hyper-commercial, now, hip and desirable.

First off the Crayola are now spelling their name with a k, as in Krayola (mimicking the teenage cop-out of Redd Kross), and therefore legitimizing themselves within the marketplace (after twenty something years of abusing it).

Secondly, Krayola cover girl Rachel Williams, a former Victoria Secret model from Woodstock who’s been in the tabloids allot lately because of her lesbian affair with rocker Alice Temple, poses like a dead blonde on an upside-down Black and Decker Workmate (perhaps symbolising the subversion of labor), that’s wrapped in plastic bubble packaging, in a see through nylon bra and camouflage pants (clearly a strong Reichian statement (revolution is the only true act of love) coded as a cheap commercial ploy) on the back of the album (infact the CD version of this record clearly states that Rachel (wearing a camouflage T-shirt with a bomb on it’s front), along with a popular Minutemen musician, is a member of the AMOR AND LANGUAGE provos).

Thirdly, a month or two after the release of Amor and Language Rachel’s full frontal nude pictorial was the lead cover story for Penthouse magazine (just one issue before the Unibomber appeared as their lead cover story). Never before has Mayo’s (K)Crayola involved such a high profile (Entertainment Tonight, FT, Vogue, National Inquirer) celebrity. There’s just one problem. I haven’t seen one single ad for this album anywhere. I’ve seen allot about Victoria Secret’s models, pornography, music of the sixties and punk rock but absolutely nothing about the one thing they all have in common. A hugely topical sell out album and not one worth while mention, song to phone up, site page, glossy ad or billboard (age of super information my bloody asshole.

[...] Give welcome to the new situ-commercialism. It’s just as exciting as anything Jamie Reid’s cooked up. The punk is dead, long live the punk. Sine rec rec qua non. (NOTE ... I believe the Mayo Thompson book that porno journalist Rachel is so intently contemplating on the back of the CD pullout is real and new. If anyone reading this could tell me where I could purchase a copy of it I would be very grateful. The damn CD picture is so small that I can’t read the publishers name. Thanx).

Jeric Smith

Jeric Smith

The Trouser Press guide to '90s rock

1997

Nine more new songs can be found on the brief, wispy and unambitious Amor and Language, the work of numerous musicians, although the undifferentiated list of participants includes sexy cover model Rachel Williams. Unlike the cagey complexities of The Red Krayola (and despite the admonition to "play extremely loud"), "The Ballad of Younis and Sofia" and "Luster" — which use only skeletal bits of guitar and organ for accompaniment — are typical. Actually, the mild-mannered approach is appealing and accessible, giving Thompson's penchant for eccentric lyrical terrain a clear field. Adding to the bizarre historical recitation of "A-A-Allegories" and the frozen waste matter falling from the sky in "Stil de Grain Brun," the detailed geometric romance of "T(I,II)" is intriguing enough, doubling the pleasure as the sonic doodles suddenly give way to a normal-sounding (with squiggly synth) rock band instrumental. Some people try to sing the periodic table of the elements and get called asshole; this never happened to Mayo Thompson.