yet more music involving saint james toth, surely-by-god the definitive polyphiloprogenitive of 2011. and for what it’s worth, briarwood, probably my favourite record this year.  some bold, straight-faced / straight-laced kristofferson moves going on here. despite what pitchfork’d have you believe it’s been a pretty good year for fellas with guitars singing songs.

buncha words from weasel walter.

drag city / yoga

m’kay maybe this is a bit too fancy to be dismissed with a wave of fuzzbox, three chords and 4/4 beat, as mere garage. but the core is thatkindofthing. s’pose it’s coming from the same place as the amen dunes record sacred bones put out this year: spacemen 3, phil spector, 13th floor elevators, etpetercetera. but there’s more oomph, more spunk, less paisley. lashings of fractured psych and muzzy blooms of tunes. hollered swoons of words and melody, smothered, covered, inward looking, buried, hidden/hiding. everything shrouded, dense, gauzey. then they lock into some bastard noisegroove, pirouetting between the ramones and v.u. sister ray jam extremes, and you want to dance with the fuckers before you lose them in the fog again.

the n.e.c.

i like e.p. hall’s music, made with voice and guitar. i like even more that the songs end up kinda damaged when she’s done with them. i like how it’s prettiness is skewed. i like that it’s off-centeredness unbalances. i like it sometimes when wheels aren’t reinvented just spun a slightly different way. i like this.

e.p. hall

full set from the best band there was before the ex…

what the fuck is this? they shriek, lunging for the (virtual) volume knob. slapping hands back with fiendish precision, i counter, glossolalia. their confusion gains me valuable seconds. i’m quickly armed and brandishing. by way of explanation i sink into religious trance and start babbling in aroused, slurred cut-up: of lord rod i fear, his oil forever runneth over me, before the staff i shall lie down, my comfort preparest thy goodness, he annointest me in shepherd water, a soul green and evil…

etpetercetera.

soon it’s all liquid syllable. i find a rhythm. a sharp descent into unsense, a wondrous singsong, a pitching mellifluous flow of language goo.

they back off.

i’m left alone, engorged, onanistically inclined; delirious, wallowing in nonsense, a pig in musical shit.

the lord? this lord is not my shepherd. not my father. not in heaven. dehallowed. unforgiving.

but.

oh my, the temptation, the evil, the power, the glory.

for ever. for ever. for ever.

amen!

i am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. i am recording the sound of my speaking voice.

i am clockwork orange alex, eyes and ears stapled obscenely open, glued to that bit in scorsese’s cape fear: bobby de niro (as played by bobby mcferrin) handcuffed to sinking boat, gibbering in tongues.

that’s a bit like what this is (having trepanned it’s way into yr skull with a tiny toffee hammer). a crack in the kishkas real horrorshow hot. vocally, a foul flatulent fuck. kindof a cappella gabba. lazy, moist, stabs at comparison: a forty minute venetian snares guffaw composed of cartoon body noise. matmos with a sense of humour (and i’ve met matmos, they’re a pair of right funny fucks). dylan nyoukis gone happy hardcore.

ach, bugger all that. distil all this. extract any pretence of musicality. leave behind nothing but butthole surfing bad drugs, mad hair, brutalist boing and klank; a warm, dribbled, semi-verbal diuretic; a mulch of dr evil duckha-duckha blethering, elastic bands, pingpongballs and kissy noises; a mid-album guitar breakdown that’s so nonsensical it makes perfect bloody sense.

noise honed; beatboxed consonants, scat vowels, bastard tics of techno, gabbled r’n’b kazoo beats, frotting, sputtering, gurgling against around over one another with pornographic glee. leaving you sticky with ectoplasm, gurning away as mutant ardour subsides.

oof. i need a cigarette…

the lord / bandcamp / exotic pylon