BURMESE:
White CD (PLANARIA) This
is only the second Burmese record I've heard. The first was
a rather sketchy experience. I don't know which one it was,
but it was in a car, driving down US Interstate 88, Illinois.
I was in the back seat. The stereo was loud and the music
was too, a rather screeching take on mid-period Melvins or
all-periods Earth. The driver of the car and owner of the
CD was talking about how he knew the band from Iowa City,
where apparently they met and formed before moving to their
current home in San Francisco (i.e. Oakland). I swear that
he also said the (impressive) drummer on the album was a midget,
but don't quote me on that.
Well, since moving to Oaktown
their lineup has changed a bit -- for example they now have
two drummers, who are both named Mark S. (The two bassists
happen to both be named Mike G, but that's too crazy to go
into right now.) On this recent album, White, they're
still doing a variation on a specific band, but it's no longer
Melvins/Earth, it's Whitehouse. In fact, they admit this,
right there in the album title and especially the subtitle,
"Interpretations of Whitehouse." This is cool, because
a lot of bands are trying to do interpretations of Whitehouse
these days, but most wouldn't admit to it. Burmese are unafraid
to admit to it because they know they do it well. The vocals
aren't as, er, keyed-up as Whitehouse's but it's still a harsh
mind eraser of an album, and like Whitehouse it's even got
that weird 'pink noise' calm & stillness in the center
of the insanity. In fact, if this album hadn't mentioned Whitehouse
on the cover, I would've just thought, "Hey, this is
a good record. Much better than the average Whitehouse imitator."
CHARALAMBIDES:
Joy Shapes CD (KRANKY) The
Charalambides have been a working band for over a decade now,
and I'd say they're still arcing outwards and upwards. There
was the early Wholly Other & Siltbreeze years, which was
kind of a duo-then-trio folk/rock/psych/blasted-ballad write-some-songs-and-make-noise-and-try-a-lot-of-things-and-see-what-sticks
time -- and almost all of it did. (Even "Gypsy Woman"!)
After a while third member Jason Bill left the band and founding
members Tom and Christina Carter pulled back on the reins
a bit for some focused duo classics like Houston
and the CDR-only Sticks/Home de facto double.
Then, sometime around the turn of the millenium, they became
a trio again with the addition of Heather Leigh Murray, retaining
their newfound focus while using the significant increase
in sound/song potentials to make each long track like a slightly
different, exquisitely detailed photograph of the same football-field-sized
patch of Texas hill country, pulling out of the ground and
floating slowly towards the heavens, magnetically trailing
intricate branches and soft vapors all the way . . . .
Well, here's five new magnetic
fields you really should take a listen to, on the album Joy
Shapes, available on the CD and 2LP format from Kranky
Records (release date May 10, 2004). In fact, I straight up
think that tracks one ("Here Not Here") and three
("Joy Shapes") are the two best tracks they've ever
done, due to the giant spiky drift of the music of course,
but mostly because Ms. Carter is doing some amazing inexplicable
new things with her role as the singer in the band. She's
always been really good, but she sounds more fearless than
ever, really controlling the songs as they expand and hover.
For two examples, check out the "Here
Not Here" opener, over twenty minutes long, in which
a hard but calm skeleton-blues riff lays the groundwork for
vintage Charalambides stretch and, around the six-minute mark,
Ms. Carter's most incantational vocal moment ever. Until you
get to the second example, halfway through "Joy Shapes,"
when her vocal goes from intensely ethereal to intensely emotional,
and it sounds like she might start screaming or crying or
laughing or openly chiding. I'm pretty sure she sings something
like How does it feel when you know you been left by the
fire, and yeah, it sounds like Patty Waters and Meredith
Monk and other 'avant' forebears, but it also sounds like
Janis Joplin and prime Stevie Nicks, while at the same time
sounding like nobody else at all, and the way she sings that
line -- not so much the melody and lyrics but the sound and
the emotion of it -- has been going through my head for days
now.
COUNTRY
TEASERS: Secret Weapon Revealed At Last CD (IN
THE RED) Their
first album came out in 1995, which is almost ten years
ago, but this is the first time I've ever actually listened
to this semi-legendary U.K. rock group. It seems like they
get a lot of comparisons to The Fall, and I can see why with
their cussed garage-prole rock approach, but I'm also hearing
Swell Maps and Homosexuals and about 100 other U.K. bands
that might've let their good ole pub songs get lost in a little
bricolage and noise. (See any volume of Hyped
2 Death's Messthetics CDR series.) And, when they really
get lost here and there I'm even feelin' a little Ceramic
Hobs! (See track 9, "Wizmo!," which is incidentally
my favorite track title so far this year.) From all this clatter
and chatter and burble emerge several rock-solid (garage-prole)
hooks, seasoned with (cussed) lyrical images of misanthropic
vitriol that actually don't sound affected. For example, they've
got me walking around humming a song called "Please Stop
Fucking Each Other," especially the chorus, which goes:
"Everybody looks like you / He's your brother / Please
stop fucking each other / You Injuns and Pakinstanis / Why
do you squabble over / an unnecessarily expensive woolen pullover?"
My second favorite tune is "Sandy," an impossibly
slow mean-blues shuffle that's like 6 or 7 minutes long. Late
in the number, frontman B.R. Wallers sings the entire line
"I hate women" in a drawn-out reputation-baiting
deadpan. The words hang there while the band lugubriously
turns around the riff, and then line two is just as short,
and turns out to be a punchline: "I hate men." Then
there's "Deaths," which is a straight-up literate
'happy' folk ballad that runs down all the people who died
better than Jim Carroll ever did. Oh, and never mind, my favorite
song on the album is actually "Man V Cock," but
you'll just have to hear that one -- it's kind of a ballad
too!
CRANKST
URGE ON: "E-Z Voiceover Box-Top Living Solutions"
7-inch (HUMBUG) Wait,
I don't think this is some new band called Crankst Urge On,
I think it's the same old Crank Sturgeon we know and love
from up in Portland, Maine! And it's always good to have him
over. If you like fucked-up dadanoise fucked-uppedness, that
is. (We do.) This time it's a 7-inch, and they were nice enough
to tell us "45 RPM," but I can't figure which is
side one and which is side two. The first side I put on is
mostly him talking to himself, or maybe even to us (the listening
audience), while obnoxious noise-gnarls crunch in and out
and ominous mic feedback hovers. The other side also has voice
but it's non-verbal this time, just hisses, grunts, gibberish
and tantrums, while the crunchy distorted shit clips in and
out. "Recorded in June 2003 at my desk using tape, electronics,
clutter, & voice." As always with Mr. C, I hear more
of the clutter and voice than I do the tape and electronics.
Edition of 220.
DEAD
RAVEN CHOIR: Wine, Women And Wolves CD (LAST
VISIBLE DOG) I've
said it before: no one puts a still chill in the air quite
like Dead Raven Choir. DRC (as their fans call 'em) are really
a choir of one, a singer and songwriter named Smolken, who
sings and plays some stringed instrument or another and maybe
does some other stuff, but not much, because this is some
really sparse and quiet music. Frozen-sounding, actually --
listening to it, I can't help but think of the way Nocturno
Culto once sang, "COLD . . . . . . . . .
. . . SO COLD . . . ."
On his albums Smolken is usually
joined by one or at most two sparse guests; here it's Glenn
Donaldson of the Jewelled Antler collective, which is a good
choice, because G.D. barely adds anything at all, and what
he does add (some wispy string pluckings here, a bone-dry
cello line there) keeps it all very . . . chilly. The sum
of all this creaking and whispering is a singular combination
of psychedelic folk, old world cabaret, and the cold chill
of black metal. I know some people kinda get turned off by
the cabaret aspect -- a guy at work dismissed it with one
word, "arty," and I can't say he's off the mark
-- but I think it's a great album. When, towards the end of
the album, after like 30 minutes of ominous advances and silences,
Smolken builds up to hissing the phrase "Chrisssstttmmasss
Meeaaat!," well, I know I've really gotten somewhere.
Even if getting there was surprisingly quiet. Wine, Women
& Wolves is the first Dead Raven Choir album to be
on a format other than CDR, and it's deserving, as it feels
like his magnum opus so far.
DIAGRAM
A/NOISE NOMADS CDR (BREAKING
WORLD RECORDS) I'm
not sure who's doing what on here and I'm not sure I ever
will know because there's no credits or info. I've listened
to it for like 2 minutes and it's already on track 11. Am
I still on the Diagram A part or has it gone into the Noise
Nomads part? Or is it a collab? Or are they switching tracks?
If so, they're busy, 'cause there's 99 tracks on here. Now
I'm on #25 -- yep, that quick. I've heard sounds that sound
like both Diagram A (chittering electronic grookage) and Noise
Nomads (bestial throat noise), or do I have their sounds switched
around? Who knows? We're supposed to be confused, because
we'll eventually come out on the other side knowing more about
ourselves and the world around us. And if we're at all into
the sounds of bestial chittering throat/electro noise, we're
going to enjoy this release no matter what, because the sounds
are quality all the way. (Oh shit, I just saw that Breaking
World is down to their last 5 copies! I need to start
reviewing things faster!)
DUSTBREEDERS
AND JUNKO: Mommy Close The Door CD (STARLIGHT FURNITURE CO.)
Sick
album of noise and screaming. Three long tracks that are very
similar in intent and motion, each a different live performance,
and never a weak moment. As far as the back story, "Junko"
is Junko Hiroshige herself, longtime member of Hijo Kaidan,
described in the one-sheet as "the legendary grand dame
of Japanese shriek." The Dustbreeders are a trio of French
guys, Yves Botz, Thierry Delles, and Michel Henritzi (hey,
I think he's written for Opprobrium!), who, since 1999, have
exclusively played "old mange-disques," which means
"slot-in record players, portable 7-inch phonographs
from the '70s, connected to guitar amps." The result
is killer noise, and the stamina and intensity of Junko's
shriek is hard to fathom.
ELOE
OMOE 45RPM 12-inch EP (INFRASOUND) When
I first saw the name "Eloe Omoe" appearing on noise
etc. bills a couple years ago, I actually thought it was the
guy who used to play with Sun Ra, falling in with a new crowd.
But no, this Eloe Omoe is filed under "E," not "O,"
and are in fact a bass and drums duo from Charlestown, Massachusets.
In fact, I believe that there were some urban legends spun
about the size of their bass rig somewhere in the last issue
of Blastitude. But I could be wrong about that. The obvious
comparison is going to be Lightning Bolt, as this is a duo
that pairs noisy low-end bass guitar and a rather frantic
drummer. So, let's talk about how they're different: Eloe
Omoe sound less composed, more like they're making it up as
they go along. At times it seems like they're playing a riff
they've played before, but they show no intention of dedicating
themselves to it as an outright honed-song attack. The recording
quality of this EP is very non-studio as well, murky and amorphous
and walkman-recorded, with each of the five tracks titled
by the town it was recorded in. In fact, Eloe Omoe are just
as fumbling and strange as they are loud and aggressive, like
if Lightning Bolt were suddenly stricken with total amnesia
mid-song. I'd say they're actually closer in spirit to totally
weird bands like the Menstruation Sisters or Volvox.
EXCEPTER:
"KA" LP (EXCEPTER/FUSETRON) This
is the sound of my generation. My cell generation, that is.
And regeneration. No, seriously, I've listened to this record
like eight times in a row and I still barely have any idea
what's going on with it. That's what happens when people with
no short-term memory listen to records made by people with
no short-term memory. Just kidding, that's just conjecture,
of course, but this guy did used to be the lead singer for
the No-Neck Blues Band (great drawing of him inside the Birth
of Both Worlds 2CD), and I can tell you that this record
takes the same dive-right-in-the-middle ethos of No-Neck,
but, without refuting that band's ass-loose funkiness, it
turns up the electronic low end much louder until it's a gnarly
heavy-acid-death-disco kind of thing. After that, other people
have already described it as well as I can. Probably better,
but it's kind of a complex album. I can't imagine any one
'journalist' 'nailing' it, but I personally plan to continue
listening to it eight times a week whether I ever 'figure
it out' or not.
BRENT
GUTZEIT: Drug Money CD (KRANKY) The
first time I ever saw anyone playing a laptop computer on
a stage, I was visiting Chicago from Nebraska in 1998, and
it was a group called TV Pow. Brent Gutzeit was and is in
that group, still extant here in Wind Town. I remember thinking
that this laptop thing was very nouveau and kinda silly in
the traditional rock club context, but by the end of the set
I was won over by the build and volume of the tones, the pacing
of the performance, and even the way the three laptoppers
were ominously placed on the stage, hiding behind their screens.
In fact, I don't think I've seen a laptop performance as good
ever since, and that was (almost exactly) six years ago (May
15, 1998).
Mr. Gutzeit is still active
in the Chicago scene as a label
CEO, organizer, and performer, but as far as I know this new
album Drug Money is his first full-press release
under his own name. And it's worthy. My first reaction was
to put it in the same one-man death-drone category as two
albums reviewed last ish: Land of Lurches by Kevin
Drumm and Effortless Battle by Ian Nagoski. After
all, all three guys go by their actual first and last names.
Drug Money is the most gentle of the three releases,
but it's long tracks are also imbued with a strong sense of
melancholy, which the album title might refer to in some way.
The first track is the deathliest, but they get quieter and
softer as they go. Track 2 is mostly gorgeous (but still sad)
soft-hum, track three is over 20 minutes long and also very
soft and sad, and track 4, which appears to be an unlisted
bonus track, you might miss completely like I did -- I was
in the other room folding clothes and I thought the CD was
over. Then, I go back to Track 1, and it sounds softer and
calmer than it did the first time, though still ominous --
hell, it sounds like early Popol Vuh. Which kind of makes
sense, because "All of the source sounds for Drug
Money were created by Gutzeit by placing electric motors
on the strings of a piano."
HAIR
POLICE: Obedience Cuts LP (GODS
OF TUNDRA) Followers
of the last year or so's Hair Police shows will immediately
recognize the opening cut, an all-time classic throwdown called
"Let's See Who's Here And Who's Not," recorded and
presented on wax in a way that actually does full justice
to the way they play it live. The rest of Side 1 lives up
to this gauntlet by extensively carrying the torch for everyone
who has ever plugged a mic into an overdriven amp and stuffed
the whole thing in their mouth. (And yes, I mean the mic AND
the amp.) Long and intense tracks, played by what you could
call a rock band if you wanted to, but this is concise, tight,
classic NOISE instead of rock. I think this is the problem
for some of the Hair Police detractors out there -- they're
expecting a rock band, but these guys are really a NOISE band.
Side 2 starts with "Boneless," a stunning spaced-out
horror jam thanks to C. Spencer Yeh on really heavy violin.
Crushing, but still one of the more restrained things I've
heard HP do, not counting the next track, "The Empty
Socket," which is just a few seconds of ominous bell
tones. Then the side gets going with some wilder gore-themed
tracks like "Open Body," the impressive "Full
Of Guts," and "Skull Mold." Their best album
yet, simultaneously released on CD by Freedom
From.
GERALD
HAWK: The Honey Guide Bird CD (ABDUCTION) The
name Jandek keeps popping up when people describe this guy,
and I can hear it, but it's really only about 1/10th of the
final product. For one thing, despite a couple mumbled warped-voice
songs, vocals are really rare, the bulk of the album being
non-instrument-specific instrumental miniatures, such as the
soft but creepy final 2 or 3 minutes of my current favorite
track, "Serious Cool Cowboy With A Bubble Mustache,"
a section that sounds like I always thought Fennesz was going
to sound like, but alas, never did. However, the name I think
of the most while listening to The Honey Guide Bird
is . . . David Lynch. It's partly because both Hawk and Lynch
are polymath artists who work in more than one medium, but
mainly because this music sounds like a David Lynch movie
to me. The creepy sound design, the harsh shifts in normality,
the way nice things like birds singing on sunny days brush
up against mystery men with hideous voices appearing from
some other sick dimension . . . it's all in here, and more,
and I'm still confused, and I like it.
KING
DARVES: I Can Almost Hum This Drug CDR (KING DARVES) Who
the hell is this guy? I don't know, but put in this disc and
go to his website at geocities.com/kingdarves
and watch the weirdo graphics accumulate while the electronics
bleat and fart, and you've got a fairly weird night on your
hands. I'd call this a noise album, that in some ways reminds
me of the Forcefield Lord of the Rings album or the
Rubber O Cement CD on Toyo, except I can't tell if it's any
good or not. Actually, I do like the way it just sounds like
ONE GUY MESSING AROUND, no overdubs, no walls of effect pedals
to hide behind. Then halfway through the album the noise gets
even sparser, like he's just plunking on twine and smashing
a trash can lid, and he starts moaning along -- reminds me
of Dark Inside The Sun a little bit. And then, the last track
is really pretty damn good -- a twelve-minute-odd solo tabletop
guitar excursion that is rooted in languid low-end-feedback
New Zealand territory but gets into some really bizarro hell-sheets
of digi-sound that, if you ask me, are totally American. I
think he's from somewhere in New Jersey, but good luck figuring
it out from the website.
This
is only the second Burmese record I've heard. The first was
a rather sketchy experience. I don't know which one it was,
but it was in a car, driving down US Interstate 88, Illinois.
I was in the back seat. The stereo was loud and the music
was too, a rather screeching take on mid-period Melvins or
all-periods Earth. The driver of the car and owner of the
CD was talking about how he knew the band from Iowa City,
where apparently they met and formed before moving to their
current home in San Francisco (i.e. Oakland). I swear that
he also said the (impressive) drummer on the album was a midget,
but don't quote me on that. 
The
Charalambides have been a working band for over a decade now,
and I'd say they're still arcing outwards and upwards. There
was the early Wholly Other & Siltbreeze years, which was
kind of a duo-then-trio folk/rock/psych/blasted-ballad write-some-songs-and-make-noise-and-try-a-lot-of-things-and-see-what-sticks
time -- and almost all of it did. (Even "Gypsy Woman"!)
After a while third member Jason Bill left the band and founding
members Tom and Christina Carter pulled back on the reins
a bit for some focused duo classics like Houston
and the CDR-only Sticks/Home de facto double.
Then, sometime around the turn of the millenium, they became
a trio again with the addition of Heather Leigh Murray, retaining
their newfound focus while using the significant increase
in sound/song potentials to make each long track like a slightly
different, exquisitely detailed photograph of the same football-field-sized
patch of Texas hill country, pulling out of the ground and
floating slowly towards the heavens, magnetically trailing
intricate branches and soft vapors all the way . . . . 
Their
first album came out in 1995, which is almost ten years
ago, but this is the first time I've ever actually listened
to this semi-legendary U.K. rock group. It seems like they
get a lot of comparisons to The Fall, and I can see why with
their cussed garage-prole rock approach, but I'm also hearing
Swell Maps and Homosexuals and about 100 other U.K. bands
that might've let their good ole pub songs get lost in a little
bricolage and noise. (See any volume of 
Wait,
I don't think this is some new band called Crankst Urge On,
I think it's the same old Crank Sturgeon we know and love
from up in Portland, Maine! And it's always good to have him
over. If you like fucked-up dadanoise fucked-uppedness, that
is. (We do.) This time it's a 7-inch, and they were nice enough
to tell us "45 RPM," but I can't figure which is
side one and which is side two. The first side I put on is
mostly him talking to himself, or maybe even to us (the listening
audience), while obnoxious noise-gnarls crunch in and out
and ominous mic feedback hovers. The other side also has voice
but it's non-verbal this time, just hisses, grunts, gibberish
and tantrums, while the crunchy distorted shit clips in and
out. "Recorded in June 2003 at my desk using tape, electronics,
clutter, & voice." As always with Mr. C, I hear more
of the clutter and voice than I do the tape and electronics.
Edition of 220. 
I've
said it before: no one puts a still chill in the air quite
like Dead Raven Choir. DRC (as their fans call 'em) are really
a choir of one, a singer and songwriter named Smolken, who
sings and plays some stringed instrument or another and maybe
does some other stuff, but not much, because this is some
really sparse and quiet music. Frozen-sounding, actually --
listening to it, I can't help but think of the way Nocturno
Culto once sang, "COLD . . . . . . . . .
. . . SO COLD . . . ." 
I'm
not sure who's doing what on here and I'm not sure I ever
will know because there's no credits or info. I've listened
to it for like 2 minutes and it's already on track 11. Am
I still on the Diagram A part or has it gone into the Noise
Nomads part? Or is it a collab? Or are they switching tracks?
If so, they're busy, 'cause there's 99 tracks on here. Now
I'm on #25 -- yep, that quick. I've heard sounds that sound
like both Diagram A (chittering electronic grookage) and Noise
Nomads (bestial throat noise), or do I have their sounds switched
around? Who knows? We're supposed to be confused, because
we'll eventually come out on the other side knowing more about
ourselves and the world around us. And if we're at all into
the sounds of bestial chittering throat/electro noise, we're
going to enjoy this release no matter what, because the sounds
are quality all the way. (Oh shit, I just saw that 
Sick
album of noise and screaming. Three long tracks that are very
similar in intent and motion, each a different live performance,
and never a weak moment. As far as the back story, "Junko"
is Junko Hiroshige herself, longtime member of Hijo Kaidan,
described in the one-sheet as "the legendary grand dame
of Japanese shriek." The Dustbreeders are a trio of French
guys, Yves Botz, Thierry Delles, and Michel Henritzi (hey,
I think he's written for Opprobrium!), who, since 1999, have
exclusively played "old mange-disques," which means
"slot-in record players, portable 7-inch phonographs
from the '70s, connected to guitar amps." The result
is killer noise, and the stamina and intensity of Junko's
shriek is hard to fathom. 
When
I first saw the name "Eloe Omoe" appearing on noise
etc. bills a couple years ago, I actually thought it was the
guy who used to play with Sun Ra, falling in with a new crowd.
But no, this Eloe Omoe is filed under "E," not "O,"
and are in fact a bass and drums duo from Charlestown, Massachusets.
In fact, I believe that there were some urban legends spun
about the size of their bass rig somewhere in the last issue
of Blastitude. But I could be wrong about that. The obvious
comparison is going to be Lightning Bolt, as this is a duo
that pairs noisy low-end bass guitar and a rather frantic
drummer. So, let's talk about how they're different: Eloe
Omoe sound less composed, more like they're making it up as
they go along. At times it seems like they're playing a riff
they've played before, but they show no intention of dedicating
themselves to it as an outright honed-song attack. The recording
quality of this EP is very non-studio as well, murky and amorphous
and walkman-recorded, with each of the five tracks titled
by the town it was recorded in. In fact, Eloe Omoe are just
as fumbling and strange as they are loud and aggressive, like
if Lightning Bolt were suddenly stricken with total amnesia
mid-song. I'd say they're actually closer in spirit to totally
weird bands like the Menstruation Sisters or Volvox. 
This
is the sound of my generation. My cell generation, that is.
And regeneration. No, seriously, I've listened to this record
like eight times in a row and I still barely have any idea
what's going on with it. That's what happens when people with
no short-term memory listen to records made by people with
no short-term memory. Just kidding, that's just conjecture,
of course, but this guy did used to be the lead singer for
the No-Neck Blues Band (great drawing of him inside the Birth
of Both Worlds 2CD), and I can tell you that this record
takes the same dive-right-in-the-middle ethos of No-Neck,
but, without refuting that band's ass-loose funkiness, it
turns up the electronic low end much louder until it's a gnarly
heavy-acid-death-disco kind of thing. After that, other people
have already described it as well as I can. Probably better,
but it's kind of a complex album. I can't imagine any one
'journalist' 'nailing' it, but I personally plan to continue
listening to it eight times a week whether I ever 'figure
it out' or not. 
The
first time I ever saw anyone playing a laptop computer on
a stage, I was visiting Chicago from Nebraska in 1998, and
it was a group called TV Pow. Brent Gutzeit was and is in
that group, still extant here in Wind Town. I remember thinking
that this laptop thing was very nouveau and kinda silly in
the traditional rock club context, but by the end of the set
I was won over by the build and volume of the tones, the pacing
of the performance, and even the way the three laptoppers
were ominously placed on the stage, hiding behind their screens.
In fact, I don't think I've seen a laptop performance as good
ever since, and that was (almost exactly) six years ago (May
15, 1998). 
Followers
of the last year or so's Hair Police shows will immediately
recognize the opening cut, an all-time classic throwdown called
"Let's See Who's Here And Who's Not," recorded and
presented on wax in a way that actually does full justice
to the way they play it live. The rest of Side 1 lives up
to this gauntlet by extensively carrying the torch for everyone
who has ever plugged a mic into an overdriven amp and stuffed
the whole thing in their mouth. (And yes, I mean the mic AND
the amp.) Long and intense tracks, played by what you could
call a rock band if you wanted to, but this is concise, tight,
classic NOISE instead of rock. I think this is the problem
for some of the Hair Police detractors out there -- they're
expecting a rock band, but these guys are really a NOISE band.
Side 2 starts with "Boneless," a stunning spaced-out
horror jam thanks to C. Spencer Yeh on really heavy violin.
Crushing, but still one of the more restrained things I've
heard HP do, not counting the next track, "The Empty
Socket," which is just a few seconds of ominous bell
tones. Then the side gets going with some wilder gore-themed
tracks like "Open Body," the impressive "Full
Of Guts," and "Skull Mold." Their best album
yet, simultaneously released on CD by 
The
name Jandek keeps popping up when people describe this guy,
and I can hear it, but it's really only about 1/10th of the
final product. For one thing, despite a couple mumbled warped-voice
songs, vocals are really rare, the bulk of the album being
non-instrument-specific instrumental miniatures, such as the
soft but creepy final 2 or 3 minutes of my current favorite
track, "Serious Cool Cowboy With A Bubble Mustache,"
a section that sounds like I always thought Fennesz was going
to sound like, but alas, never did. However, the name I think
of the most while listening to The Honey Guide Bird
is . . . David Lynch. It's partly because both Hawk and Lynch
are polymath artists who work in more than one medium, but
mainly because this music sounds like a David Lynch movie
to me. The creepy sound design, the harsh shifts in normality,
the way nice things like birds singing on sunny days brush
up against mystery men with hideous voices appearing from
some other sick dimension . . . it's all in here, and more,
and I'm still confused, and I like it. 
Who
the hell is this guy? I don't know, but put in this disc and
go to his website at 
