Gregory Jones & Roy Sablosky - 'No Imagination' (Vinyl)

There isn't much more one could want from a record of experimental electronics. No Imagination does quite a lot across its four tracks, and it's the only release by these guys apart from a new wave band called Standard of Living that they were both in; so this was probably seen as their experimental 'side project' if anything, which is a shame, cause I'd love to hear how their musical relationship may have developed over time. The four cuts traverse fairly different territory for a record that is built around two guys with electronics, though my favourite track is Jones-less, only featuring Sablosky plus James Gable on 'transducer guitar' and Marianne Fraenkel on vocals. It's a 15 minute long dirge called 'Intro (Summer Names)', perversely not the first track, but coming after 'No Moon No Mirror' (which is a proper intro). But 'Intro' the song consists of a heavily repetitive guitar strum, firing ecstatic overtones in conjunction with Sablosky's electronics, and the faint intonations of Fraenkel's spoken text. It's just there to feel more than listen to, obfuscating the urge to interpret verbal meaning. Her delivery reminds me of the voice on Blue Gene Tyranny's 'A Letter From Home'; this, to me, is an aesthetic device that I associate with the American avant-garde circa the time of my birth, when this was made. It's a beauty, a real storm of a musical work that feels romantic, adventurous, warm and cold all at the same times as it howls along. There's no acoustic presence on the other three tracks, but they're no less impressive; 'Diverted to Frankfurt (for Twelve Pulse Generators)' is, unsurprisingly, written for 12 pulse generators and the stark palette of their timbre makes this an active, complex convergence of sound. 'No Moon No Mirror' is an ethereal piece for synthesiser where the two musicians tease each other through space, sounding like something from the Kranky records catalog two decades later. It's marred only by a very audible scratch on my copy, which if it were on 'Diverted to Frankfurt' might not be so noticeable but here it shocks the stillness between the synth pulses. 'Forced' is the final cut, another long one, and it resembles the 'Amazon rainforest' approach to electronic improvisations. There's not so much a tonal basis as that of a swarm of insects, and it's as manic and active as the previous two tracks. It's best played loud - the whole record is - so the juxtaposing staccato bursts of static and square waves can get the resonance they deserve. This is a great record for turning your head slightly while listening, to change the way the overtones interact with one's hearing - the best minimalist/drone records have that, and it's nice to be achieved on something so compositionally distinct. Totally great and singular!

Home Blitz - 'Foremost & Fair' (Richie)

How an artist progresses in just a few years! The first clue is the cover, where typeface and drawing indicate this will should sound like a Fairport Convention spinoff, though that's a bit of an oversell. At first it's a total red herring (though in the keyboard and harpsichord bits initially heard, especially during 'I'm That Key', there's certainly some influence of more regal, courtly music than before) but then side two's 'Tell Me There' appears and we are in some sort of bizarro New Jersey-Shirley Collins hybrid; where power pop meets ragged bedroom punk and British folk too! Another clue is the voice - Mr. DiMaggio has raised his pitch even higher, or at least is breathing harder behind it. When you focus on the tone of his beautiful yelp-croon, his debt to Scott Miller is even more obvious than before. 'The Hall' has an organ crunch which feels like way more than a one-man recording; it's somehow one of the best Home Blitz songs ever, even if it's hidden at the end of side 1. 'Downtown' breaks into a musique-concrete based bridge over which he pontificates in the most 'Watch Who You're Calling Space Garbage Meteor Mouth' manner possible, and otherwise it's maybe all in the affect, but it's a hell of a method I must admit. And then there's 'Why It Cries', the moment of total free-from experimentation that harkens back more to DiMaggio's other band Car Commericals, or to that one time I was left unsupervised in a music instrument shop that focused on medieval instruments. It's a great expanse of space, which would be described as 'fucking around' to the uninitiated, but it's a vision of existence committed to vinyl, and then erupting in a bit of a jig. Thank god for the ability to hear so much music these days; I keep recalling that collection of Jonathan Lethem essays called The Ecstasy of Influence, which is a great title to describe music like this. It's not like no one ever synthesised different influences in the past, but it feels so much more open these days, which isn't to diminish the marvellous leftfield accessibility of Foremost & Fair - just that it's a bit less of a headscratcher when a young musician can discover so much out there via digital means. I guess what really matters is the curiosity, which is here in spades. I can't wait to hear what he'll do next, if he's still active, that is. 

Hampton Grease Band - 'Music to Eat' (Columbia)

You probably thought the last Gunter Hampel record was responsible for the months-long bottleneck here at the Underbite (if you thought anything at all) but no, that was written and just not posted for some reason, ages ago. It's the Hampton Grease Band that's kept this from going forward, and I'm not quite sure why. Music to Eat lies somewhere between 'funny thing to play people at parties' and 'something I genuinely love', but I vacillate between the two states, so maybe this is Schroedinger's LP. This is truly one of the stupidest bands to ever get a major label release, and I include the Barenaked Ladies and Green Jellö in that list. But the Hamptons fit into some sort of vision I have about late 60s/early 70s freak music, even if the music isn't particularly visionary. I love the whole lore around this band - that it was somewhere between prog-leaning bar rock and and dadist art experiment, that members of the band would invite their friends up on stage to eat breakfast in their bathrobes during live gigs, and that the drawing of the military tank on the back cover is because they forgot to send any artwork for the back cover and it was just a drawing one of the band members had lying around. But the music is a pretty intense jam. I've worn out side 1, 'Halifax', where the band teaches us all about that Canadian city and establishes their formula: jammy blues-rock, occasionally prog-leaning, and with random nonsense sung over top. Bruce Hampton's pipes are great though, a regular Robert Plant, and his cry of 'Wouldn't you like to come to Halifax?" is an all-time great album opener. Fifteen minute later they are still at it, and there are passages of this song that are totally great. The fast boogie guitar solo about halfway through sounds a bit like the Italian prog band Area if you're reaching, and I think I just always wished this band was just a tad more in the cosmic direction. But 'Halifax' and 'Herndon' (side 4) are perfect, glorious kitchen sink rock jams, embracing the absurdity of the era and probably deconstructing something at the same time. 'Maria' opens side 2, with a much more overtly novelty-learning song, drenched in sexuality and coming off as the alpha-rock counterpoint to the Holy Modal Rounders' 'Griselda', though I think this predates it. And then it goes on and on through a variety of shorter songs, and it's a maddening experience. The sheer ambition and lack of editing here are remarkable but it becomes quickly impossible to sort out the diversions and jams. The resulting mess is a bit too close to Zappa/Mothers from the same era for my tastes, though I'd by lying if I didn't admit the teenage me loved 'Billy the Mountain'. Anyway, there's a LOT of Music to Eat, and side two starts to wear out its welcome. Side three is mostly dominated by the 18 minute suite 'Evans', but there's still room for another nearly 8 minutes of 'Lawton'. Jesus Christ, is this record long. I swear I have triple LPs that feel shorter - Armand Schaubroeck's first one, for example, or that Daphne Oram set. But the endurance test is part of the charm, if ya feel it; the Hampton Grease Band, if anything, are underrated. 'Evans' feels like a blizzard of guitar solos but then the track that follows it up, 'Lawton', is probably the musically most interesting part of the record - a dark, jammy psych instrumental that sounds like the Davis Redford Triad or some murky space-rock outfit from the late 90s, only this is '71. It all builds up to 'Herndon', where Hampton sings the label from a can of spray paint, before it segues into more nonsense. It becomes increasingly hard to pay attention by the end of this record, after one has been listening to it basically all night long. The fortitude is astounding for both self and the artists themselves. Discogs shows some odd post-Hampton Grease Band paths for them. One guitarist put out a solo 7" years later on Hib-Tone, the label famous for releasing R.E.M.'s 'Radio Free Europe' single; another played with Henry Kaiser in a band called Obsequious Cheesecake. As for Colonel Bruce Hampton himself, he seems to have enjoyed quite a long career in various projects I've never heard. This is the infamous record, and maybe part of its infamy is that it's not a slam-dunk - it's no Trout Mask Replica, but it really has some pretty good parts. I feel like I've written this much about Music to Eat now and come nowhere closer to solving my 'is it actually good or is it a party record?' dilemma. But obviously I don't throw parties anymore, anyway.

John Greaves / Peter Blegvad / Lisa Herman - 'Kew. Rhone.' (Virgin)

The lineup here is impressive, and I've always wanted Kew. Rhone. to be just a little bit more attenuated towards Blegvad's quirky pop songwriting and less towards sounding like 50 other art-rock records that I have. Many would probably call this Blegvad's masterpiece as a lyricist, which may be true -- but my copy is missing the lyrics sheet! Thankfully the Internet steps in to fill things out, because Kew. Rhone. is made up of riddles and conundrums. Maybe it's not going to make your soul weep with heart-rendering emotional ballads, but what's here can get the brain raging like nothing else. That is, if you can pay attention; there's so much going on with the backing tracks (Andrew Cyrille's drumming is particularly impressive) so it's easy to tune out to what they are crooning about. And some songs, like 'Catalogue Of Fifteen Objects And Their Titles', are just that - lists, brilliant to read on paper, and brilliant to listen to sung over a prog track, but it's hard to pay attention to while it's happening.  Do the lyrics reflect the music? Probably under deeper study, yes, but my big complaint with Kew. Rhone., and I know this is blasphemy as a supposed Blegvad fan, is that for such unparalleled lyrical constructions, the music feels better suited for some of Chris Cutler's stern Marxist musings instead. Of course, John Greaves is responsible for the compositions, and this is 1976, so it's still very much derived from the Henry Cow sound; any sort of punk influence is nascent, though 'Nine Mineral Emblems' has a pretty manic jam between a noisy guitar (I guess Blegvad's) and Michael Mantler's trumpet. Mantler and then-wife Carla Bley are strongly felt here; compositionally it feels pretty much like a merger of Bley's work (from that period) with that of Henry Cow. Above it all soars Lisa Herman, a very under-recorded vocalist whose voice is perfectly suited for this progressive, arty sound. At times she is soulful and at others screeching; when she duets with Blegvad ('Apricot', among others) she has the ability to bring out a certain quality in his voice. As incredible as songs like 'Pipeline' might be (which refer to Blegvad's drawings on the back of the album as an essential component), it's only a few times that I feel the band is really exploring some new territory (such as the remarkable closer 'gegenstand'). With further study, I suspect I could become mildly obsessed with this record. And I love In Praise of Learning, yet this I wish sounded more like Slapp Happy. I dunno. I guess I'm just too demanding. And there's a book out about this now, which has spawned a few online articles proclaiming this record's greatness. Everything lines up to make this something I should be obsessed with, but perhaps I missed my chance. Or maybe the book, which I'm ordering now, will illuminate things more clearly.

Andrew Graham's Swarming Branch - 'Classic Glass' (Tonk)

This is one hell of a sound sound, and it warms my heart that there's a gang of youngsters in Columbus, Ohio making music like this. Do you like Tin Pan Alley, musical cabaret and a Harry Nilsson/Van Dyke Parks vibe? But also fuzzy, jammy indie rock with psychedelic riffs galore? This might be for you, and I can guess this might be a love-it-or-hate it aesthetic; it's about as far from macho posturing as I can imagine while still being 'rock' music, yet to me this doesn't sound affected, even though Graham's singing technique is a bit like the guy from Cockey Rebel crossed with Basement Tapes-era Dylan. As the band name indicates, Mr. Graham is the singer-songwriter behind the Swarming Branch, but keyboardist Dane Terry (creator of a a fantastic solo album we'll get to, one day) is a pretty strong presence, and the bright, springy drums of Sean Leary aren't to be overlooked. This trio makes up the core, I guess, but there's guest musicians galore, including three 'lead guitar' players, obviously not found on every track. It's a bit messy to unravel but it doesn't really matter, because it sounds like a BAND. Their self-administered label is called Tonk and the concept of the honky-tonk rears its head from the majestic/shambolic opening cut ('That Constant Country Thirst') and lyrically in the amazingly cryptic and simultaneously anthemic 'Holy Joeys, Cognoscenti, Tar Babies In Love'. But I wonder what honky-tonk even means to them? There's hints of Nashville in places, sure, such as the slide guitars on 'The New Age Succuba, Susie Jean', but everything feels warped as hell -- and not through a druggy or surrealist haze. It's actually a really hard aesthetic to put a finger on, but it's one that feels confident and open at the same time. The rising and falling guitars and keyboard lines are occasionally chillingly beautiful; 'The Pounce' is as close as this record comes to a ballad, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. And sometimes it just drives straight ahead in the way that rock and roll does best. The high point of the album (and of music overall for the past few years, to these ears) may be the medley of 'This Water Does Not Reach The River' and 'I Warn You' that ends side 1. The first of these is a manic, high-energy stomper and the latter a 4/4 mid-tempo dirge that has some simple, yet stunning interplay between the instruments that makes this feel like a genius chipping away at a rock to reveal some sculpture. When Swarming Branch fall into these more straight-forward moments, it's incredibly satisfying; besides 'I Warn You's powerful punch, 'Final Boss' feels practically like a stadium-rock song, with a relentless pounding on the piano, some synth creepage courtesy of Ryan Jewell, and Graham's irrepressible voice soaring over it all. It crashes to an epic finish and effectively ends the record as the last track is an electro-pop oddity by a guest artist - a strange choice, but this record is a bouquet of strange choices, really, which all gel together to make some odd sense. I am more excited to hear what they do next than I am about just about anyone else actively making music today.

Gordy Horn ‎- 'The Glue That Holds The Kids Together' (What The...?)

Four tracks spanning five years of Gordy Horn, a chaotic Cincinnati ensemble that has a bit of a kitchen-sink 'anything goes' approach to sound and membership, yet anchored by Scott Hisey and Tim Schwallie. These four tracks have a vaguely jazzy/swing feel to them, but the headscratchers is 'Aimee's Dream' (the earliest cut, from 2000) which exists in its own singularity entirely. This has a bizarrely sung female vocal line over a hypnotic string part (a harp!), but it sounds more like the outtake of a video made for some workplace seminar than any sort of identifiable art-rock tradition. It's mesmerising and unsettling, yet somehow still feels logical with the other three tracks. Two of them involve Clayton Gunnells, formerly of Funkadelic circa America Eats Its Young, which makes this an odd crossover with What The...? label head C. Spencer Yeh, who appears on 'Put the Rascal in the Pudding', contributing some of his distinct violin playing circa the era (2003). The horn is in Gordy Horn, not that explicitly in terms of there being actual horns (though there is sax and trumpet) but just feeling like this is from the free jazz lineage. But this reminds me more of parts of Smegma's Glamour Girl 1941 than anything from ESP-disk; it's an outsider aesthetic, for sure, as well as the sense that anything could be possible. One-sided LPs are sometimes frustrating; these four tracks fill out a side nicely, but why not more? Given that Gordy Horn has been active forever, one thinks there could have been more selected, though maybe economical concerns limited this to one-side. Their released discography is pretty sparse besides this and a tape set, on Yeh's other label Dronedisco, suggesting that maybe they were recorded less than one expected. In nearby Louisville there's a band called Sapat that I think is rather similar - a long-running institution, anchored by a few key members, that have had oodles of weirdos and freaks passing in and out of, and rarely recorded (or rather, those recordings rarely massaged into actual releases). Not sure if the Horn is still active these days but I would love to hear more.

Comus - 'First Utterance' (Earmark)

This is the stuff where legends are made, and certainly everything about First Utterance converges to produce something entirely worth of its acclaim. Since I like to wax personal here, I'll say how First Utterance surfaced on my consciousness around 2000-2002, which was also the time that I was discovering British folk/rock from this period, plus prog and other old gems. The Badaboom Gramaphone 'folk' issue was pretty influential and really set the template for things I wanted to investigate, and remember this was in the early days of mp3s - i think I might have actually sucked this down from Napster during it's heyday. After reading about the lost gems of bands like Fresh Maggots, Agincourt, and Tudor Lodge -- and often finding them less than gemlike - Comus was the real deal. In fact, the Badaboom Gramaphone #4 itself says "Seriously odd, and terribly necessary." There's not one thing that makes First Utterance so good; I wish we could say it was "just" the demented lyrical content, or "just" the frantic 12-string thrashing, or just the juxtaposition of insanely Appolonian beauty in the most Dionysian of contexts. But of course it's all of these things, and far more. My favourite track has always been 'The Herald', perhaps because it's tripartite structure seems to create an entire universe in one 12 minute burst. The female vocals are impossibly angelic, and the rolling waves of arpeggiated acoustic guitar have a narcotic effect on me. Despite the placid surface, there's some real thrashing about going on underneath it all - the sleep of reason producing demons for sure. It's a musical world I envy and would love to recreate myself, but such smooth confidence is beyond me. I guess it's a good counterpoint to 'Drip Drip', where the male vocals dominate in the most tortured and affected way. As a "band", Comus have what it takes - the long group instrumental passages are attenuated to a primal stomp, and the darting violin riffs jumping out constantly feel like they are emerging from a common dark heart. And when you're singing about being raped by a pagan spirit you better back it up. Both sides start with relatively short, upbeat tunes that would almost work as singles - 'Diana' and 'Song for Comus', the former being more or less the signature Comus song though it's far from their best. The string playing is fantastic though, and there's a real prog edge, reminding me a lot of Aphrodite's Child. Actually much of the record reminds me of Aphrodite's Child, but a bit more farmyard, and also Aphrodite's Child never sang about dragging Christians into the woods and killing them. 'The Bite' is of course the most overt in this theme, and it's also aggressively-paced, producing a real sense of fear, suggesting the poor victim's desperate attempts to escape. The flute playing here is deft as well, and I suggest anyone who thinks they might not like flutey folk music check this out. Because First Utterance defies everything logical about music. It's clearly created by the most extreme outsiders, a band motivated by pagan bloodlust as much as the pursuit of the sublime - yet it occupied some of the most accessible, upbeat musical territory. Even in the changing Britain of 1970, coming out of swinging London and all that bullshit, the subject matter is shocking. And musically, they couldn't be more out of step with popular music of the times. When put up against Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs and Fairport Convention, there's only a superficial resemblance in instrumentation; against Canterbury-school prog, there's none of the jazzy carefree benevolence. Tyrannosaurus Rex might be the only comparison, but maybe just because of the vocal resemblance - a song like 'The Prisoner', which addresses mental illness in a first-person narrative way, cuts through any sort of pop/psych surface. This particular edition is lovely - it's a thick vinyl pressing, gatefold cover, the extra-nice inner sleeve that has the plastic inside the paper to avoid scratching, and a bonus 45rpm 12"! The bonus material is the single version of 'Diana', which is a bit slower and more gloomy, and then two extra songs from an EP released in 1971. Of these, 'In The Lost Queen's Eye' is more of the same which is not a bad thing; 'Winter is a Coloured Bird' is significantly more chilled out, foreshadowing the shitty second album (which I only heard once, but disliked immensely). I had a friend who claimed to have found an original sealed copy of First Utterance in some weird Yorkshire secondhand shop for a few quid, and then he fell asleep listening to it and a candle melted and fell over and then burned the cover. Given the collectibility of the original pressing, he's a bigger fool for even breaking the shrinkwrap.

Tim Buckley - 'Starsailor' (Straight)

His curls are cropped a bit but his voice, inner and outer, is more wild than ever. This is Starsailor, a record where all the planets are in alignment. I know this is considered a groundbreaking avant-garde work, but it's not as insane as it's reputation might lead you to believe. This flips the inside/outside dynamic of Lorca somewhat, with 'Starsailor' (the titular track) providing the furthest foray into drone echo on side 2, and side one having rather "straight" songs that almost perfectly assimilate Buckley's ideas. Overall, Lorca's side one experimentation is the guiding light, but there's a remarkable concision to the way these songs are executed. Albumwide, nothing is longer than 5 and a half minutes, and the rhythmic freedom and meandering tearducts are largely controlled. And the songs are great. In retrospect, his debut album now feels like songs written for a less powerful voice. As Buckley grows into himself, his songwriting steps up to support, like a really fancy office chair that doesn't neglect the lumbars. 'Jungle Fire' synthesizes some of Happy Sad's 'Gypsy Woman' with side two of Lorca, but also allows Buckley to experiment with strange chord changes and voicings. 'Come Here Woman' is a great opener, setting a dark tone but then changing direction whenever it gets easy. 'Monterey' is a smashing riff-driven rocker where Buckley's pushing things with his voice. 'Moulin Rouge' is Buckley's foray into Kevin Ayers territory, with a village band feel carried by Mothers of Invention member Buck Gardner. Because I heard this record a generation or two after it was made, it's sometimes difficult for me to place what was an influence and what has been influenced by, follow? Though of course I can hear bits of Annette Peacock, US Maple, etc, it's really a singular work. Though who's to say that 'Starsailor''s layered fades aren't somewhat attributable to a healthy serving of Otto Luening? Of course we can't leave without talking about 'Song to the Siren', which by this point I should be tired of because of a million teeny mixtapes and This Mortal Coil's overblown (or brilliant, depending on my mood) treatment. But in reality, this is one of the most remarkably beautiful 3 minutes and 20 seconds ever put to wax, combining fragility, distance, depth, spookyness, energy and occlusion into something absolutely perfect. It is inspiring and devastating; it justifies the existence of the chorus effect; it is a raft from which I hope to never wash ashore, because with resolution comes complacency.