Possibly
the Last Record Review Column I Will Ever Write (Part 1 of
6)
by
Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman
7
YEAR RABBIT CYCLE: Animal People CD (FREE PORCUPINE SOCIETY
RECORDS)
7
Year Rabbit Cycles and Free Porcupine Societies? Care to throw
in some Bat Chain Pullers and Vampire Can Mating Ovens while
you're at it? Seriously though, one of the founding members
of Deerhoof is Rob Fisk, but he quit the band to move to Alaska
with his wife and build a log cabin. They also started a band
called 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. Free Porcupine Society Records
might be their own label, which means that they might now
live in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the label has its mailing
address. Or maybe they record in their cabin in Alaska surrounded
by 700 miles of forest and snow on every side. Actually it's
a little ranch house at the end of the very last blocks where
Anchorage turns from city completely into country. Actually,
these are just hypotheses. For a FACT, I can say that this
album comes wrapped in card-stock paper with what seems to
be real paint on it, in that 'spooky childlike pastel' style
that I really associate with Deerhoof for some reason. Early
Deerhoof, anyway, cuz I've only heard them once and that was
quite a while ago -- but jeebs, they've been busy! Four seven-inch
vinyl singles (one of them a double -- that's the record I
heard, and it had a 'spooky childlike pastel' cover), 5 full-length
compact discs, one vinyl LP, and one handmade book! I still
don't know much about the acclaimed 'hoof, so I'm kind of
coming at this backwards, but 7 Year Rabbit Cycle play some
intriguing, spooky, and, as all the imagery would suggest,
bestial-type music. The arrangements are minimal; I don't
think there's ever more than three elements in any one song,
and they seem to be: one, a heavy bass or electric guitar
outlining what is often a single naked & ominous ostinato
riff; two, crude drumming that seems to only intermittently
appear; and three, screechy, spooked vocals, sometimes female,
sometimes male. Reminds me of Dg. 307, and you know that's
a complement.
ALGEBRASSIERE:
Mooning Mardela CDR (ONE-TOUCH RECORDINGS MONOPOLKA)
"Everything
on this album improvised." But they aren't doing some
serious 'soundscape' crap, they're doing unserious sloppy
snot-rock crap, complete with TWO vocalists singing tons of
lyrics in goofy voices. I picture them with the cheap mic
in one hand and paper that they're reading off in the other.
Content is pretty goofy and profane and the delivery is obnoxious.
Track three has a vicious opening line: "Did you hear
T.T. Boy coming over to pull back your head so he can fuck
your neck?" That might work for you, but after listening
to the whole album I definitely feel that these guys could
chill out on the vocals a little bit. I do like the "bum
bum bum" drone vocal accompaniment by the other guy,
very Lower East Side, very ESP folk. The band jamming is good
lo-key sound shifting, too -- but you don't always notice
with all the singing. Throughout the album there seems to
be some nice tape/SFX slurpage going on way in the background,
almost like the jug of Tommy James, and some of the guitar
kind of shreds in a lo-fi burnt-psych way, almost like Stacy
Sutherland. But we'll never know if they really are the next
Elevators -- the album's too long and has too many vocals
to sit around for the whole thing. Which means you'll miss
good tracks like #23, which is called "like a real crazy
night (white line fever)" and has a good trance-rock
beat and some pretty reet avant guitar supporting refreshingly
sparse and slightly humorous lyrics about cocaine. Next time
they should hit with an EP. (And this just in, they are 'hitting'
with an 'EP' soon, a split LP with Gang Wizard, on "black
bean and placenta . . . tis to be co-released by ecstatic
yod, breathmint, sunship & little mafia.")
ARNOUX:
"Live" CS (FOREIGN LANDS)
Arnoux's
brand of violin hacking can get pretty deep, but sometimes
it just sounds like Godspeed You! [sic] Black Emperor played
wrong. This tape also brings the sawing noise jams, this time
with a live ensemble featuring Charles Lareu and others, but
also so much more in the form of short psycho live theater
dialogues between Mr. Arnoux and another whining punk aesthete,
which might also be Mr. Arnoux, talking to himself via tape
recorder playback. The sawing noise jams periodically stop
so that the duo can offer a vague and harsh critique of the
audience and the scene, more stumbling than withering, but
unrelentingly heavy and I haven't forgotten it. This play-acting
is met with such stone silence from the audience that I didn't
think there actually was one, but then a pretty large round
of (stony) applause rings out and that's the end. Chilling.
AVARUS:
III
LP (HP CYCLE)
It's
been kind of hard to find new music that is bad-ass and deconstructionist
(i.e. "form destroying") but also melodic. Now that
form-destroying is followed as a genre, it would seem that
one of the "rules" of the "genre" is to
avoid melody as much as possible, for fear of being associated
with the new indie Dan Fogelberg movement. We at Blastitude
miss those days of yore when forms were easier to destroy
because they were fewer and music was not yet uptight about
such things as being bad-ass or being melodic or, for that
matter, form-destroying, and just did what it did. Thin Lizzy,
Cheap Trick, Sparks, Black Sabbath (the melodies are of limited
range, but there's TONS of 'em), the New Wave of British Heavy
Metal, Big Star, Phil Spector . . . to name a few.
Saying all this in an
Avarus review is kind of tangential, but I do so because when
I put on side one (or possibly side two, there's no way of
knowing which, not even an etching on the run-out groove),
I hear good old form-destroying tactics like space-ug and
white-ethnic psych-freak, but somehow I also hear MELODY.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to compare Avarus to Sun
City Girls, but the similarity goes beyond just the vibe of
the cover art: it's that both bands know how to make the free-form
Faux East freak-outs that not only freak and destroy, but
also sing.
Things get really good on what
I'm calling side two of this Avarus LP (the side with the
slightly less busy swirliness on the label), with a minute
or two of ominous out-rock tape-mangled soup followed, via
tape edit, by the band just kicking up a punk frenzy. And,
it keeps on going with one fine jam after another. There's
a scary banjo jam that's almost as heavy as the one on the
new Pengo LP (reviewed elsewhere). Who'd have thought, two
of my top five releases of 2003 have got banjo on 'em . .
.
BARNACLED:
6 CD (CORLEONE)
Album
gets this issue's "Is that puke on the cover?" award,
but I'm thinking "Uh oh, not another noise-prog band
with saxophones and an accordion." Bands like this always
try to rock out all crazy, but they always end up sounding
like they'd just as soon be playing some contemporary classical
recital and/or studio klezmer, and the rock-out parts are
just these stomping arbitrarily dissonant riffs that are just
like (sing with me) "WE-are PI-rates POUND-ing ON-the
DIS-sonant NOTES!"
The good news
with Barnacled is, the more you listen, the more you realize
that only about 10% of the disc ends up being the pirate schtick.
The rest of the time, Barnacled break down the compositions
into super-stretched interludes and well-played non sequitirs.
Or, as Roctober put it in their review of the album, "Classical
music/Klezmer party Jazz hybrid music played on squeaky balloons
and ham radio receivers." (Actually, that's the whole
review, so I should properly credit it to Flamin' Waymon Timbsdale,
the King of Reviewland. I just read it today. Roctober rules.)
These guys really can play -- the nimble sax melodies are
total professional prog . . . but that also kind of adds to
the whole 'I could be playing for grant money' aura. I'm keepin'
it, but I guess we'll have to see how much it actually gets
pulled out. (Update: I did play it on Radio
Blastitude this week.)
BIG
TECHNO WEREWOLVES/HANS GRÜSEL'S KRÄNKENKABINET:
Feel It SPLIT CD (TOYO)
I
love the package: a DVD case with svelte black felt pasted
on it. Feels great. I like the Kiss joke, too: Big Techno
Werewolves are a trio of Peter Crisses! But then I don't know
about the first couple tracks. One Werewolf plays roots/blues
acoustic guitar while the other werewolves lay waste to it
with total dada junk noise. It's got some reckless abandon
to it, but at the same time it's kind of an easy equation
that practically screams "But you'll love our weird costumes
when you see us live." Track three "StarMystic"
gets somewhere, because it's a song instead of an equation.
Very much in the style of No Doctors but even more F'ed up
and less arena-ready, it's the theme song for the whole glam
werewolf image. One of the finest 'new rock' tracks of the
year, seriously, but after that it's back to the junk-provs.
Again, there's a 'fuck it' quality that's kind of redeeming,
but I don't know, those had better be good costumes.
The CD's next great moment
after "StarMystic" comes with "Big Techno Werewolves
Meet Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet," which is
the transitional track between the two acts that share this
CD. The junk-prov keeps going while wolf-howls start emerging
from a fog that's creeping in. And thus the tone is set for
Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet.
I didn't really want
to like Grüsel either; how many No Wave acts from the
Bay Area are going to do the "I'm a funny German"
schtick anyway? Sorry, I just don't think umlauts are that
funny anymore. Ah,
but as much as I thought I would just toss this CD out the
window (keeping the felt-covered case, of course), I can't
because the atmosphere pins me to my chair, changing from
black fog atmospheres to rainbow stream atmospheres, as in
burbling electronics. Certainly still a little QUIRKY, especially
with the oompah calliope music that seems to bookend each
"suite" (that's what he calls 'em, and it's not
a joke, these really are suites), but the rest of the time
it's just straight stream atmospheres, and as far as avant-garde
clichés go, I'd much rather hear burbling electronics
than someone just playing their guitar funny for the 3,000th
time. The burbles of the Kränkenkabinet pan left and
right for a really broad and, dare I say, moving
spectrum of spaced-out sound, well in that spaced-out electronics
tradition that includes such luminaries as Conrad "Genius"
Schnitzler, Richard Pinhas, and Allan Bryant. (P.S. If Allan
Bryant put out a 100-disc box set of just his synth solos,
I would probably listen to every one . . . but I doubt I'd
make it through all the liner notes! Rim shot, please.)
BLACK
FLAG: Some CDR "Anthology" A Guy Made ("A GUY
AND HIS COMPUTER" BOOTLEG SERVICE)
Track
one is "Gimme Gimme Gimme," Keith Morris version,
and track two is "My War" and the transformation
is stunning. It's like The Seeds became Mahavishnu Orchestra.
But that's mainly just the fusioned-out "My War"
intro, when the singing kicks in it's more like metal, and
I'm like, how could this guy singing, tearing shit up, be
such a dork now? Oh yeah, people get old. Then it goes back
to The Seeds era for the INCREDIBLE Keith Morris-sung "Wasted,"
which might be the greatest song ever written, which is saying
a lot when it's only 51 seconds long. "I was a surfer,
I was a fuck-up, I had a skateboard, I was OUT ON MY OWN."
Something like that. Hey, then the comp bounces back to some
fusion-era shit! I think the compiler is alternating Morris
songs with Rollins songs. Clever! Nice bootleg.
DAVID
BOWIE: The Man Who Sold The World CD (RYKODISC)
For
some reason I can never completely concede that I like Bowie.
Everybody I know loves Bowie, I love Bowie, but I never want
to like him. I do think he's overrated -- man, I've tried
to get into Station To Station about seven times
now and it still hasn't worked. (The only song on there I
can still really remember besides "Golden Years"
is that "Transmission" one.) And really, a lot of
his stuff is just kind of Liberace in Vegas. For an example,
I still can't listen to Hunky Dory from beginning
to end -- just can't do it. But there's definitely good ones
-- I really like almost half of the Aladdin Sane
album, especially "Panic in Detroit" and the incredible
languid title track. And then just a couple weeks ago a co-worker
put this one in. I'd never heard it before, and was quite
surprised to hear what sounded VERY close to Black Sabbath's
first album! Okay, maybe not VERY close, but this is essentially
a heavy, lurching power trio rec, with Mick Ronson playing
guitar at his most balls-out and super-producer Tony Visconti
playing the perfect power trio bass (who knew?). The drummer
is Mick Woodmansey, and he was one of Blastitude's Top 10
Micks of Rock (although his name on here reads Woody Woodmansey,
which is even better). And, the trio is augmented by a full-time
Moog player, so that's cool. I don't know, I just wanted to
mention how HEAVY this album is, in case you were like me
and didn't care to hear it because you thought it would be
kind of lollipop.
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