East River Pipe

"This is EAST RIVER PIPE album #4" states the sleeve of The Gasoline Age with characteristic simplicity. That’s probably there just in case you didn’t notice the first three. You wouldn’t be alone. F.M. Cornog has never been feted for overstating his case, and his albums can hardly be described as aggressive, either in their musical content or their marketing strategy. But it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for, and with album #4, F.M. Cornog takes another step towards recognition of his extraordinary melancholia.

Understatement is a valuable and rare skill, one that few can lay claim to today. In an era where it is almost blasphemy to suggest a record can pluck the heartstrings without the use of a forty piece orchestra, F.M. Cornog aka EAST RIVER PIPE is the guardian of the subtle musical brushstroke. Saluted by Rolling Stone as "... the most gifted of the new loners", Cornog allows every note and every breath to count, and The Gasoline Age offers as good a place as any to experience his unique style. Inspired, in large part, by night time drives on New Jersey’s seedy/gaudy Route 22, it is, possibly, the most fluent of all his recordings so far, best illustrated by the automobile imagery that appears throughout the album. Cybercars, stolen cars, pimpmobiles, they all seem to carry with them a romanticism that emphasizes even further Cornog’s gift of creating a lyrical mood without tying his flights of fancy down to specifics. And this is no sentimental speech of the heart. You might hear a soaring melody swept along by heavily reverberating keyboards and guitars, but don’t let it deceive you - chances are Cornog has just invited you to step into hell (‘Hell Is An Open Door’). You might marvel at the explicit pathos of ‘14th Street Boys Stolen Car Club’, but don’t miss that threatened kneecapping.

To understand the motivation behind the gentle beauty of EAST RIVER PIPE, it is perhaps necessary to offer a few biographical details. But, then again, a few is all there is. Cornog records alone on a Tascam 388 mini-studio at home, which is currently New Jersey, after years spent living next to the Hell Gate bridge in Queens, New York City. He’s a self-taught musician who, for some time, looked like society might reject him faster than he could reject society. Alcohol abuse and dead-end jobs took their toll on his spirit, and maybe without his music that spirit might have withered away. But maybe it’s that very element of survival that lends his music such a gloriously bitter sweet air, rivaled perhaps only by country soul outfit Lambchop.

This is hardly surprising, given that Cornog is, in his spare time, a "satellite" member of Nashville’s finest. Kurt Wagner and his crew have recorded five of Cornog’s songs over the course of their last two albums. "When I listen to East River Pipe," says Wagner, "I not only hear beautiful melodies and words, but I also hear the personification of pure, unfettered musical thought, brought about by a commitment to concentrate solely on his craft and his art. This is the sound of a man completely focused on the task at hand, not sidetracked or swayed by any outside forces, be it record labels or any other aspect of the music industry."

It is the intimacy of these recordings, in which Cornog manages to distill the most complex and intangible emotions, that separates East River Pipe from the pack. As Wagner says, "This is the sound of a man whose only musical relationship is that of sound to a tape recorder. Because he chooses not to perform ‘live’ he further reinforces the significance of this relationship between a man’s ideas and the form in which we are able to perceive these ideas. He knows when he makes a record that ‘THIS IS IT, this is all there is.’ Pure. Simple. Perfect."

The Gasoline Age offers many perfect examples of that pure, simple perfection. Take ‘Party Drive’s exquisite escapism, or the blissful buildup within ‘Cybercar’ (a recent split seven inch single with Britain’s Baby Bird on Easy!Tiger Records). Compare these with the upbeat nihilism of ‘King Of Nothing Never’, (covered in their own inimitable style by Lambchop on their most recent ‘What Another Man Spills’ album), or the wistful longing of ‘Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Million Tonight)’. Each song is a perfect translation of a man’s spirit, as though the music had flowed onto the 1/4" tape telepathically. Truly, it is a magical thing to behold.

You won’t find EAST RIVER PIPE on the covers of your favorite music magazines. You won’t find EAST RIVER PIPE on the stage of your favorite indie rock venue. You won’t find EAST RIVER PIPE waking up the kids on children’s television. But you will find EAST RIVER PIPE permanently engraved on the hearts of all those who hear The Gasoline Age. Tell your closest friends.

East River Pipe is the guise of singer/songwriter F.M. Cornog, who began recording his melancholy one-man pop on a Tascam 388 mini-studio in his apartment in Astoria, NY. Born in Suffolk, VA, and raised in Summit, NJ, Cornog followed a difficult childhood with a series of jobs in a carpet warehouse, a greenhouse, and a light bulb factory. After a longstanding bout with alcoholism and an emotional breakdown cost him his job and left him homeless, Cornog hit rock bottom; while sleeping in a Hoboken train station, he met Barbara Powers, who eventually became not only his girlfriend but also set up the aspiring musician with recording equipment and his own label, Hell Gate.

Fatalistically dubbing the project East River Pipe after imagining a connection between his music and the raw sewage dumped into a local river basin, Cornog began issuing home-recorded cassettes like 1990's Point of Memory and the following year's I Used to Be Kid Colgate before he and Powers raised enough capital to press several hundred copies of a single, Helmet On. After the record won Single of the Week honors in Melody Maker, East River Pipe was signed to the legendary British independent label Sarah Records, which collected much of Cornog's previously recorded material on 1994's Shining Hours in a Can.

After signing to the American indie Merge, East River Pipe returned in 1995 with Poor Fricky; Mel followed in 1996, trailed three years later by The Gasoline Age. Four years after Cornog's return to New Jersey (and the subsequent release of The Gasoline Age), East River Pipe released Garbageheads on Endless Stun in 2003, and 2005 saw the release of What Are You On? -- still on Merge. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide