You're gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man

Listening to The Shadow Ring’s Hold on to I.D. as I drove home on I-95, I found myself questioning the context behind my enjoyment of the album. If I exhibited a brighter outlook on existence, would Hold on to I.D. still hold the same value to me? The album features an increasingly surreal, apocalyptic tone, as the band intertwines a tale of rising water and intrusive aqua vermin with their band’s history. The instrumentation is sparse and dark. Lambkin plucks jagged, eerie guitar lines alongside a steady drumbeat and occasional flashes of Casio-induced white noise. Harris reads the lyrics in a deadpan, adding a frightening delivery to the dark instrumentation. If abstract art failed to engage me, I doubt I would be as enthralled by Hold on to I.D.

I spun the Shadow Ring disc for some friends one night and someone told me it sounded “pretentious.” I fail to see how art that was created by amateurs who cannot properly play their instruments yet manage to extract valid, entrancing melodies and dense, dark atmospherics can be pretentious. The Shadow Ring achieves something very honest and endearing by maintaining the passion and conviction to create art despite the obvious setback of their inability to properly play instruments. It sounds as if they fashioned a dobro out of spare guitar strings and a porch leg and assembled a series of boxes to get their message across. Yet it works because the band puts effort into their craft and labors over the final product. I’ve always felt like certain artists have a path and, if they sway too far from that path, they fail. A band trying to distinguish itself from a cookie-cutter indie group could attempt something similar to the Shadow Ring and fail miserably. Their professionalism always shows through and their freak speak never appears to be authentic. If the band rapidly strums their out-of-tune instruments like Neanderthals, hits scrap metal for an abstract percussion effect and screams about gravy pie, then I could see calling it pretentious.

But I tried to put myself in my friend’s place. What characteristics does the Shadow Ring convey that make them targets of this type of criticism? To me, overblown execution, big-budget production and grandiose aspirations warrant the pretentious label. For instance, the Guns ‘n Roses video trilogy that ends as Axl swims with dolphins warrants this description. Somewhere along the line, the music-buying public confused amateurishness and/or abstractness with pretentiousness. It coincides with the beliefs that music artists must be proficient at their particular instruments and anything that breaks with tradition and challenges the listener must be made by pompous art fags.

Then again, sometimes a new sound shocks our senses and elicits a negative response before we fully comprehend the artistic statement at hand. The other day I was listening to the Damaged and I noticed all the fuzz encrusting the tunes. I always heard critics describe the act as “noisy” and but I failed to fathom what traits warranted this description. I knew they inspired a lot of bands that incorporated dissonance and atonalities into their musical regimens. I neglected to notice the feedback Greg Ginn integrates into his riffs because bands like Sonic Youth already desensitized me to it. With crust and power violence coming to fruition as I became aware of punk, some of Black Flag’s aggressive power was lost in translation on me. Coming from a different angle and hearing Black Flag with fresh ears, it would probably take me a while to adjust to the fuzz, subject matter and overall sense of “otherness.” I might label it as somehow foreign or alien.

I cannot say if my opinion is valid or not. If you harbor similar interests, then you might enjoy the way I assess things. I sometimes project my vision of humanity onto my reviews. I also reserve dispositions, wherein, if an album contains or lacks a certain combination of elements, I accept it as a great record. For instance, one of my favorite equations goes something like spooky poetry + blurs of fuzz + intensity + shitty recording techniques = awesome band crush.

If my surroundings, personal history and circumstances were different, my tastes would probably be different. This realization sparks the question of why my opinion even matters in the long run. Given that people voice different views about music, one critic cannot convey an ultimate truth about an album. If one ultimate voice does not exist, canonization becomes obsolete. I only fathomed two valid reasons for the existence of my writing—namely, I write about music that lacks coverage from most major outlets and I am pretty well versed in rock history and the evolution of certain niches of rock. Other than that, subjectivity kinda wins.

Whatever. Here’s some picks:

Orange In the Midst of Chaos CD (reissue De Stijl, 2008): I really lack enthusiasm about new jazz and unearthed free-jazz “gems.” I never grasped the plot and am still trying to bone up on the old stalwarts. I enjoy Paul Flaherty but just looking at his discography can be a daunting task, nevermind pondering where to start. Much of the free jazz movement running concurrently with the freak folk thing fails to spark any semblance of enjoyment within me. Sometimes I feel like these guys just honk their horns, to paraphrase the great philosopher Scott Foust, and reveal the same white squalls of shriek each time. So, I approached the Orange album with small expectations but the record overcomes a lot of the hang-ups I harbored. Bassist Bob Laramie, Percussionist Glen “Hobbit” Peterson, Guitarst/Trumpeter Barry Greika and Flaherty formed the band in the mid-‘70s. Per usual, the record exhibits Flaherty’s soulful wailing sax as it ascends from earthy blues grooves to stellar heights. However, Greika’s chameleon of a guitar style boosts the album beyond the Ayler rehashing that inevitably appears on a lot of free jazz records. The fluid, loose guitar lines evoke different disciplines in the same tune. Greika’s lightning fast fret work allows him to skirt the typical pentatonic jazz bozo guitar. During “Om Shanti” alone, Greika storms up the fretboard, cranking crooked skronk sounds like a crazed Sonny Sharrock. He switches gears halfway through, as Flaherty softly pipes in, and builds a crackling, minimal base to the bearded one’s excursions. A definite no wave feel flows through the album but ambient pieces hold the thematic thread together. “Peace,” a ghost ritual with vocals pushed as low as possible, and “Sunset Beyond Safety,” a chilly seven-minute dive into ambient electric sound with percussion up front and jazz beneath the sound glacier, give the listener reprieve from the lip snarl attitude. The record gets bogged down about two-thirds of the way through the album, as the band eats Ascension pie and farts out Ayler’s ghost. However, it ends on an extremely high note with the fluttering futurism of “Subway over the Rainbow,” a blast into the krautrock atmosphere. As In the Midst of Chaos comes to a clattering, cacophonous end, the band’s gravity pulls the listener towards the chaotic sound.

Sky Juice Hard to Kill LP (Olde English Spelling Bee, 2008): This record contains all the trademarks of another great-but-faceless Maim & Disfigure release: an effortless, pasted together album art aesthetic, crude magic marker cover art with lots of curvy lines, wicked guitar tantrums and a band name that evokes both drugs and sex. For the most part, Lambsbread axeman Zac Davis steers away from the psychedelic free-for-all guitar heroics of the Ohio-based three-piece. Hard to Kill is a schizophrenic look at the many music talents of Davis as he slogs through hardcore, layered psychedelica, creepy bedroom murk and acid washed noodlings. The album’s beginnings only hint at its contents, as Davis piles wild echoing guitar lines overtop one another until they cannot be separated. Quickly, the train derails as the alleged mail-stealing midget pounds out a thick doom trudge that devolves into a mentally damaged acoustic and electric guitar spasm. The first hint at Davis the songsmith follows, as a dope-addled, claustrophobic blues howl with a tantalizing Eastern riff. Although choppy and arguably incomplete, the tune sets the pace for the rest of the album, as it weaves in and out of moods and modes. The guitar regains the centerpiece when a towering instrumental ode to Vishnu suddenly squashes the serene scene. For the remainder of the album, Davis exhibits prime creative impulses when sprawling out a laid-back, somewhat restrained guitar workout. His virtuoso distorto-jams crop up occasionally, only to be sucked back into the black tar. The album’s apex comes after Davis’ second slurring blues retreat, as the slinger maps out a tight 4-track odyssey with bleak Oriental string movements overtop a simple set of axe chirps. Davis shows a penchant for pasting loose guitar scraps into a seemingly tight composition, only to smash them apart and continue to pound any semblance of the original form into fine dust. Ending the album is a mammoth ode to Twin Infinitives. Davis churns out a crunchy, repetitive riff and spreads wayward soloing and feedback overtop. Though it will likely garner Twin Infinitives comparisons, Hard to Kill belongs in the same fractured universe but it has its own voice. The album hints that, maybe someday, Davis will construct a work of art as massive as Royal Trux’s sprawling double LP. Until then, he’s content to sit back and give the world a sampler pack of his virtues. get it from oesbee[at]gmail[dot]com or go to Fusetron

Sic Alps Untitled 7” (Important, 2008): Colored vinyl sucks. It wears out quicker and the color makes it hard to find a single track on the disc. The label warns the consumer that the one-sided disc only contains one track. But that one track happens to be a cover of a Throbbing Gristle tune. And the band executing the cover is known for its quality control. So, I shelled out the $7 to get a copy of the record and patiently awaited its arrival. When it finally came and I threw it on the player, a well-controlled industrial racket welcomed me. From there, the Alps kick out warped, flowery hermetic love tune with eroding edges. The guitar sounds like a rusty electric junkyard dobro mapping out the soundtrack on a decaying 8mm ‘70s student film. Settling beneath the watery, echoing vocals, the guitar line creeps under the skin with the nostalgia of a Johnny Gosch milk carton photo. Well worth the extra dough.

Gonna go listen to this Dead Girls Party CDr. Have fun. Send nude photos and contact me about your records at kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com. Always willing to listen to new stuff.