s’like exile on main street yeah? but transplanting the rambunctious fuggy blooze of jagger / richards (or the uber-demented pussy galore dismantling of it) with the murky psych-garage of donovan / hartman onto four sides o’ vinyl. ain’t stopping here with the parallels. both long, sprawling, messy, gauche buggers.
as old bob christgau put it: weary and complicated, barely afloat in its own drudgery, it rocks with extra power and concentration as a result. more indecipherable than ever, submerging mick’s voice under layers of studio murk.
aye. alongside sly stone’s there’s a riot goin’ on, exile proffers up one of my favourite fucked-by-production-job-that-somehow-works-and-actually-improves-the-record records. and i s’pose part of the appeal of thiskindofthing is the taped with two mics, on an eight track in a basement, raggedy murk that smothers everything. not that this is a times new viking into the flipping red overblown overdriven punch to the gob type of lo-fidelity. nah these fuckers are playing around with it. definite skewed edge to the recording process here.
but enough of this stonesian procrastination.
napa asylum. twenty two tracks, in a forty eight minute stumbling blur. veering wildly, like drunks on nighttime bus, betwixt (sm)art noise and pop and psych and garage and country andandand… well you get the picture.
starts with the wooden wand-esque fucked-in-nashville ergotism of jolly. stumbles to a close like the half-arsed noise jam that lurks at the back of nirvana’s in utero (monged anti-solo and all) with nathan livingston maddox. in between? a rum bunch, a collection of awkward rawk and uncomfortable melodies played out with ragged simplicity. sometimes a two chord shuffle that disintegrates before it’s ninety seconds are up. sometimes a fizzing clatter that lopes over the finishing line wheezing for breath. sometimes brittle and skeletal (ranger consists of barely two notes and a gluey fist of feedback). sometimes lusty, fleshy and a-fire (the flailing around stoogerry of the first white man to touch california soil, complete with high voltage channeling, swivel-eyed soloing).
fragments of a buncha stuff they like, a buncha records they’ve listened to, a buncha influences fucked with. geographically it’s like columbus ohio via san francisco; philadelphia pennsylvania via christchurch, new zealand. skip spence lysergia reverberating against too-much-caffeine jitters. jarring with the juxtaposed. prettiness scarred, deliberate in their sabotage. and in that latter sentence sic alps in twenty ten remind me of royal trux at their subversive best, who seemed to take the louche heroin-addled lope of exile on main street to it’s natural conclusion. an anarchic mangling of the traditional strut and propulsive moves of rock und roll. a multitude of classic tropes lovingly buggered and battered and bruised. music not so much built as, gnawed at, unconstructed.
songs as sketches, songs that finish before they’re done, desperate to get on the next idea. songs fading out in a dribble of lalalalala’s. songs stuttering to a halt coz the melody rhythm and chords are all used up. a bit too abrupt and post-somethingorther cold at times, like a siltbreeze issued victorian aunt. a bit more blood and spunk wouldn’t have gone amiss. but that’s a minor grumble. it’s a record that goes nowhere and everywhere at once. in the best possible way.
