Jowe Head - 'Pincer Movement' (Hedonics)

That's an aesthetic I like - a strange cover, strange title, and contents that are definitely rock music but, well... strange. But it's fun! I know Head more from Swell Maps than Television Personalities, and that makes this feel rather contiguous since these songs are murky, deconstructed and generally kinda fucked up. Plus, it opens with 'Cake Shop Girl' which is also on Jane From Occupied Europe and actually on Head's second solo LP a few years later, too. I guess he really liked that song. I do too - it's fast, nervous, and cryptic while being sort of catchy at the same time. Pincer Movement's 'Loco Train' could also be a Swell Maps song, and maybe it is - I find all those Maps compilations confusing and their entire discography beyond the two proper albums is just a blur to me. Anyway, there are only a few full-fledged 'songs' on Pincer, with a lot of little ten second interstitials tying them together.  And some are just loose structures to jam over, though it's a Swell Maps style of jamming - not guitar solos or melodic improvisations, but textural jamming, if that makes any sense. 'Quatermass and the Pulpit' is a great example of that - a looping beat, with vocals chanting 'Kyrie elision!' and percussion sounds get freaky (both acoustic and electronic), various other treated instruments whirl and jigjag, and the whole piece turns into a psychedelic gel. It could easily keep my attention for 20 minutes, yet it ends after 5 (which is a classic showmanship manoeuvre).  There's a theme set by the titular pincers - songs about sea life, crustaceans, and mermaids abound. 'Mermaid', for example, is a dubby number occasionally erupting into layered shrieks, with all manners of odd keyboards, wind instruments and other affected experiments overtop of the pulsebeat. 'Wimoweh' is a cover of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' and it's a mad descent into layered tones and insanity. 'Crawfish' appears on both sides, first the 'Son of' and then the full version, and it's probably the album's most memorable track, herky-jerky and bold. Things get borderline goofy - 'Glass Animal Colony' seems to privilege the vocal hysterics over the textures - but everything is moved through quickly, which leaves me wanting more. By golly, Pincer Movement is great, a document of an unapologetically experimental time for art-rock in the UK (1981) and one that holds up well especially against the never-ending revivals of post-punk mannerisms. The band members all have great pseudonyms such as 'Phones Sportsman' and 'Prince Empire' -- plus, 'Crawfish' is technically an Elvis cover. And this can be yours for a relatively inexpensive price - for some reason this record has never become that collectible.

Cro-Magnon (ESP)

For the few of you that actually follow these pages, you'll notice some large gaps in-between posts. Usually these are due to unexpected life circumstances - traveling, moving, working -- because (surprise, surprise) I don't do Disclocated Underbite and related pages as a full-time paid job. But sometimes I hit a lull because I'm trying to wrap my head around a single record, and I can't properly put down my words about it and move onto the next one until I've given it several, sometimes numerous, goes around the ol' Pro-Ject Debut III. Cro-Magnon is DEFINITELY a bottleneck record. It's been on my shelf for years, unplayed, the only time I ever actually listened to it a few years before I bought it (when I was consuming all things ESP). My memory was that it was intentionally primitive, as were all rock-leaning ESP titles (The Godz!!), and maybe the spiritual predecessor of No Neck Blues Band and their ilk. This was a bit of an incorrect assessment, I do believe -- going back to it now, I'm floored. This sounds like some contemporary noise kids have access to a time machine, so they went back and dropped this artefact and then disappeared. But I don't mean to say that Cro-Magnon sounds like a mediocre DOD-pedal noise band - if my time-travel theory is true, then this is the cream of the crop, because this record slays pretty much everything that is happening today. I know this is sometimes called Orgasm and sometimes called Cave Rock, but my copy, with the black and white cover, bears neither title - just a photo of three moustached dudes (again, three guys that could definitely pass as contemporary hipsters from Brooklyn, Berlin or Potland in 2011) and the tracks, listed with side B first. This is the most "avant" of "avant-rock"; equal parts psychedelic exploration, musique concrete, noise-thrust-fusion and horizontal soundscape. There's nary a trace of prog, though - the structures are brutal and primitive. Even the dazzling opening cut, 'Caledonia', is a mindless verse-verse-verse structure, made amazing through the parched vocals, dissonant instrumentation, and bleating bagpipes. On the flip, 'Crow of the Black Tree' manages to sound huge and complex, though it's only two acoustic guitar chords throughout. It's deceptively beautiful at the beginning, like a postcard from Andalusia dropped in a puddle; the overall feeling resembles Amon Duul 1, minus any trace of "good vibes". Pretty much every track on here is singular and brilliant, and goes in a different direction than what precded it. 'Fantasy' even sounds like the Beach Boys, only warped; 'Toth, Scribe I' is the dense murky jam that you've been waiting for and it doesn't disappoint over it's ten minutes. 'Ritual Feast of the Libido' and 'Organic Sundown' dominate side A, conjuring images of stones in coffee cans, loincloths, and shrieks. 'Genitalia' utilises some insane bird noises that are synths (I think), like the United States of America record on crack -- except crack hadn't been invented yet. Being "ahead of its time" alone is not enough to make something great, but for someone like me who weaned himself on outsider-orientated music, hearing something like this particularly revelatory.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - 'Doc at the Radar Station' (Virgin)

Man, I love Doc at the Radar Station. It's probably my third overall favorite Beefheart album. And who would have thunkit from the (lovely, yet limp) coverart and necktie-adorned band photograph? Sure, Shiny Beast was the comeback album but this is the true comeback. The record explodes with 'Hot Head' and there's the crunch and menace that was missing for most of the 70's -- this is 1980, too, not a year particularly remembered for fucked up music. As hinted at in the last post, John French is here on slide guitar and maybe he's just what the missing element was before. 'Run Paint Run Run' always makes me think of the VU's 'Run Run Run'; the trombone finally fits here. And best of all is the voice - it ain't what it was in '69, sure, but it sounds a lot better than the Spotlight Kid era crooning. In 'Ashtray Heart' you can literally hear him turn it on, like stepping on a BigMuff pedal for the larynx. There's so much to love here. 'Dirty Blue Gene' is wonderfully bonkers; it's like a swirling cloud of office supplies over ice. French cuts through this all like an inbred Eddie Van Halen. 'Sue Egypt' is a fairly free love poem over a haphazardly strummed cacophany. 'I think of the dust on the chair / and under her eyes' and reading that line doesn't even hint at the true beauty of this piece. Not to mention this song is presumably where the Bad Vugum label got their name. 'Flavor Bud Living' is one of the best guitar riffs I've heard out of all these records - it bubbles and burns, perhaps due to Gary Lucas' guest guitar playing. And 'Making Love to A Vampire With a Monkey on my Knee', despite its title, is all plunderous lurching and f-bombs; not at all the novelty song you'd fear. Dark sexuality rages but maybe it's just the neckties. A classic for sure.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - 'Strictly Personal' (Blue Thumb)

Strictly Personal is always a bit savaged in the record guides, claiming that Bob Krasnow ruined it with his overtly 'crazy' production. I used to think this was nonsense and that Strictly Personal was underrated, great even -- but listening now I agree that Krasnow is to blame for whatever is lacking here. This isn't so much because it's whacked out with reverb and flange (cause those parts are cool, like some dub-blues-psych hybrid) but because the production is just bad. If you listen to the first part of 'Trust Us', the drums sound like they're being played underwater (though not in a good way), and the whole performance feels like the highs and lows have been sucked out, leaving only a gross-timbred middle section. I understand that the technique of rock music production wasn't as developed in 1968 but given how many other amazing records came out at this time , I don't why they couldn't get this one right. Again, it's a shame because Don's songwriting has developed another stage in its complexity, with some proto-Trout Mask brilliance. 'Son of Mirror Man - Mere Man' is one work of genius, even despite the mismatched levels and farty bass sound. I've always wondered about that title - is 'Mere Man' the name of Mirror Man's son, or is this song about the son of someone named 'Mirror Man-Mere Man'? This song though enters a new realm of melting ice cream on the hoods of racecars - a realm opened just earlier with the bendy overlapping end of 'Trust Us'. Side two opens with 'On Tomorrow', a dark screaming song that melts into the sublime 'Beetle Bones n' Smokin' Stones', a taste of the animal-deranged vocal stylings that the good Captain later became famous for. The Mirror Man Sessions CD has the better, longer, unaffected versions of a lot of these tracks (like 'Kandy Korn') and overall is a better listen -- probably one that renders Strictly Personal obsolete -- but we'll get there on the Cinderblock tip soon enough. The good moments here are great though and it's certainly a transitional work. Though the Beefheartian vibe is true California all the way, I manage to incorrectly assign a imagistic geography that places it in some weird South that may actually be under the surface of the Earth's crust. Certainly the bluesy deconstructions are responsible for this, but they weren't consciously thinking about deconstruction when creating these records (at least I hope not!) so maybe that's why it actually rocks pretty hard.