|
The Roy Tinsel Band:
Crash Course in Open-Heart Surgery.
(Learning To Rock)
Like an extravagant drunk careening through a sour cocktail
party, this glitter-eyed Portland band tells it hard and
wild, its maudlin flails often stabbing uncomfortably close
to home. Roy Tinsel (a.k.a. Ryan Myers) has disturbed and
provoked local audiences with his glam-damaged, cross-dressed
solo show for some years; with a fierce and wide-open rhythm
section backing him, his emotional and sexed-up songs achieve
a new sprawling life. With its swerves of spastic noise,
rock fury and Bowie-esque melodrama, this is a deuced hard
album to categorize. Except to say, it rules all it surveys.
The Eternals:
The Eternals
(DeSoto)
This odd and beguiling record will chase mundanity from
your life with the speed of Germans fleeing the Moscow suburbs
in '42. Damon Locks once sang for Trenchmouth--and Trenchmouth
was hot, frenzied, fanatical and weird. With some of Fugazi's
fury and a lot more experimental madness than those better-known
rabble-rousers, T-Mouth mashed ska, dub, hardcore and electronics
in a sound that didn't so much damn the present as it did
yearn openly, desperately for the Future. This new band
makes a further exploration of the dark sonic corners suggested
by Trenchmouth's more freaked-out material. Drenched in
dub's mystery and monstrous undertow, the Eternals meditate
on these times of chaos. Locks' rambling warble is the star,
something between a Beat's blissed-out trance and a sidewalk
madman's prophetic chant. Damn fine record. Damn fine.
Wolf Colonel:
The Castle
(K)
The cover of the latest longplayer from Jason Anderson's
Portland institution looks like the dust jacket from a much-worn
edition of a modernist novel printed in the '50s. (And that
title--literally Kafka-esque, and out on K Records,
to boot.) This, as they might have said in a musty black-and-white
detective movie, could be a clue. Records like this aren't
made much any more: Wolf Colonel's loud, rich, furiously
detailed and infectious songs recall gloriously unironic
classic power pop rather than the miserably calculated,
"funny" pisstakes on the genre more common in contemporary
circles. For here you have it all in living color: massed
hand-claps, guitar tracks slithering in reverse à
la Revolver, leadfooted drums ricocheting through
echo caves. Those unable to content themselves with the
simple (note: not the same as "simplistic") pleasures might
have to look elsewhere.
Reckless Kelly:
The Day
(Valley)
These Austin cowboys leap right out of the gate with "Floodwater,"
a beer- and rain-soaked rocker augmented by a slithering
fiddle and twangy Jew's harp. After that auspicious beginning,
however, the Kellys slip back into a semi-slack bar-band
routine that, while coolly gruff and unpretentious, never
kicks out of the lasso of listless familiarity.
Titan:
Elevator
(Virgin)
Spin recently labeled Titan's ping-poinging Atari-2600
bleep disco as "avant-kitsch," a term so dunderheaded it
illustrates just how confused and clueless the state of
electronica is today. Think about it: trying to link the
descriptor "avant" (essentially, French for "forward") to
the backward-dragging clutches of "kitsch" makes as much
sense as telling Mario Andretti to win the Indy 500 by driving
in reverse. But that's the moronic trick everyone's trying
to pull lately--and as Titan proves (again), it's not just
an overeducated/undertalented American Gen-X thing. From
the discos of Paris to Titan's Mexican bedroom, the whole
electronic world's gone rabid for retro. And you remember
what to do with rabid dogs, don't you?
|
