Stereo Sanctity

I wish the ape a lot of success.

Stereo Sisterhood / Blog Graveyard:
After The Sabbath (R.I.P?) ; All Ages ; Another Nickel (R.I.P.) ; Bachelor ; BangtheBore ; Beard (R.I.P.) ; Beyond The Implode (R.I.P.) ; Black Editions ; Black Time ; Blue Moment ; Bull ; Cocaine & Rhinestones ; Dancing ; DCB (R.I.P.) ; Did Not Chart ; Diskant (R.I.P.) ; DIYSFL ; Dreaming (R.I.P.?) ; Dusted in Exile ; Echoes & Dust ; Every GBV LP ; Flux ; Free ; Freq ; F-in' Record Reviews ; Garage Hangover ; Gramophone ; Grant ; Head Heritage ; Heathen Disco/Doug Mosurock ; Jonathan ; KBD ; Kulkarni ; Landline/Jay Babcock ; Lexicon Devil ; Lost Prom (R.I.P.?) ; LPCoverLover ; Midnight Mines ; Musique Machine ; Mutant Sounds (R.I.P.?) ; Nick Thunk :( ; Norman ; Peel ; Perfect Sound Forever ; Quietus ; Science ; Teleport City ; Terminal Escape ; Terrascope ; Tome ; Transistors ; Ubu ; Upset ; Vibes ; WFMU (R.I.P.) ; XRRF (occasionally resurrected). [If you know of any good rock-write still online, pls let me know.]
Other Place. // One Band. // Another Band. // Spooky Sounds. // MIXES. // Thanks for reading.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The 25 Best Records of 2012: Part # 3.

15. The Choo Choo Trains – tape

(self-released)

One of the best live performances I saw this year was London trio The Choo Choo Trains, in a crowded room full of chattering bodies not paying a great deal of attention. Playing in slow, quiet and determined fashion, the band pretty much ignored their audience and surroundings, building a solid, self-contained universe around themselves amid the chaos, running through a series of skeletal, minor key pop ballads and sad, strange guitar instrumentals, reluctantly allowing us a glimpse into a private world that seemed very special indeed.

From a know-it-all music fan POV, the band possess a kind of wallflower otherness that very much aligns them with Dolly Mixture or The Marine Girls, with a persistent sense of melancholy that seems to come entirely from the latter. But there is nothing deliberately referential going on here. Absolutely none of the contrived scene boosterism or ill-advised C86 nostalgia that so often blights this sort of thing. The world of The Choo Choo Trains seems wholly self-created and self-sustaining. Not precious or arch or garish or ironic, just… simple, and modest, and different. And good, more to the point.

I don’t want to push the naivety angle over-much here, but, rather than carefully composed (ie, boring) album, this lengthy ‘complete recordings’ style tape release is a format that seems to suit this band very well. It has the feel of an unedited collection of things they came up with during a long, long, unhurried practice session, quietly discovering the joy of making music together. And if it could perhaps be argued that, conventionally speaking, we don’t really need to hear a repetitious five minute organ instrumental with snatches of foreign language spoken word (‘Rockabilly Blue’) or an awkwardly executed bit of high school prom night incidental music (‘Something About Dancing’), they all form part of the overall spell being cast, and I’m glad that they are here.

Though the atmosphere remains remarkably consistent across the tape, variety is plentiful. Ramshackle indie-pop bangers (‘Hilma’, ‘Dreaming’), subdued, carefully crafted twangy guitar instrumentals (‘Peppermint Gardener’), hesitant recreations of Buddy Holly-esque heartbroken ‘50s pop (‘Lonely’, ‘(all I Ever Think About is) Rabbits’), eccentric Jonathan Richman style hymns to the everyday (‘Rocket Bicycle’) – all are present and correct.

Touching & inspiring, this is music made with no audience in mind, no real purpose beyond its creators’ own satisfaction. The feeling it conveys reminds me very of such holy documents as Epic Soundtracks’ ‘Debris’ or The Clean’s early EPs – a reassuring flame, and a timely reminder of why I do all this stuff in the first place.

14. Mi Ami – Decade (100% Silk)

I’m really at a loss for something to say about this one, but I’ve certainly listened to it a hell of a lot this year, so there must be something going on here.

Last I heard, Mi Ami were some sort of conceptual art rock duo who released a record with Bob Marley’s face on the front. Now, apparently, they make straight up techno / deep house sorta stuff, and, utterly absurd though it may seem for me to fall back on a couple of ex-indie dingbats for my repetitive beats when there’s a whole churning, ever-changing universe of actual dance music out there, I can’t deny that the results please me greatly.

Opener ‘Horns’ contrasts the gleaming urban sprawl of its glacial synths and echoed hi-hat pulse with an utterly unhinged vocal line buried just below the surface, a somewhat terrifying sounding individual of unguessable gender trying to clamber aboard the hover-car of the music from below, chanting and screaming, “I feel so fucked up, get me out”. The overall effect is akin to pulling into a giant, utopian silver railway station in a hyper-modern bullet train, and looking out of the window to see a disfigured, acid-damaged hobo gesticulating wildly at you. Unnerving, but revealing. Human spirit crushed beneath the machinery and all that.

Second track ‘Time of Love’ lacks such jarring tactics, but I like it even better – a blissful eleven minutes of celestial disco perfection, glass towers of quivering bass rising from the metronomic pulse as dubbed out voices and echoes speed through the side streets in slowed down Doppler effect style.

Years ago I’d probably have despised this record, raging against shitty, inoffensive, backgroundy electronica designed to make graphic designers and fashion students feel better about themselves. These day, 20+ plays on itunes tells you all you need to know, I suppose. S’good, I like it. Look, it’s got a VHS-warped ‘90s straight-to-video sci-fi jacking video, so it must be good:

13. Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Friends –

Y’anbessaw Tezeta (Terp Records)

The saxophone is one of those instruments that, like the violin or the accordion, allows no room for amateurs. Either you know how to get a good sound out of it, or you should probably shut up. Getatchew Mekuria knows how to get such a good sound out of it, he seems to throw most accomplished first world players back into the amateur category. His tone is so deep and rich and sonorous that its effect goes beyond the immediate feelings of warmth and welcome and actually becomes slightly queasy and overpowering – an overwhelmingly generous sound, like a Blue Whale stepping out of the ocean to say hello and shake hands.

As is extensively chronicled in the sleeve-notes to this album, the initial meeting
between Mekuria and The Ex seemingly proved a life-changing turn of events for both parties, giving the “grand negus of Ethiopian sax” a new lease of life, allowing him to present his music to audiences around the world after years present playing standards to VIP guests in an Addis hotel lounge, and helping the Dutch punks to undertake perhaps the most rewarding tangent of their long career, reconfiguring the gigantic, cyclical melodies and gargantuan swing of Ethiopian big band jazz for electric rock and avant improv formats, with the earth-shaking results presented on 2006’s incredible ‘Moa Anbessa’ album.

Apparently it was Mekuria himself who expressed a wish to get together with them to make another album – one that the sleeve notes repeatedly refer to as being perhaps his last, the implication being that his health is no longer really up to the demands of performance, and that retirement beckons (proceeds from this album go straight toward his retirement fund). As such, ‘Y’anbessaw Tezeta’ is Mekuria’s record through and through, with his European collaborators often remaining distant in the mix, slightly hesitant to disrupt their leader’s flow, with only the steady, rolling pulse of Katherina Bornefeld’s drumming remaining a constant, as the horn section of regular Ex collaborators interject only for brief, carefully controlled bursts as a counter-point to the central voice of the sax.

Certainly, listeners anticipating something as pulverising as ‘Moa Anbessa’s ‘Ethiopia Hagere’ will be disappointed, as the mood here remains more restrained and contemplative, more in keeping with the original laidback sound of vintage Ethiopian jazz recordings, with the warlike roar of The Ex’s lurching punk rock only occasionally making its presence felt, as the guitarists often fall back on providing more gentle textures of scraping and feedback.

Just hearing Mekuria do his thing is more than enough to satisfy though. His playing here remains as powerful as ever, representing the legacy of a man who has given his whole life over to perfecting and existing within this sound. Stormy discontent brews through the seven slow-burning minutes ‘Ambassel’, a beautiful, expansive track full of mournful trumpet and double-picked guitars, that requires me to use all my self-control to avoid going on about desert winds and shadowy, masked armies. Traditional melody ‘Bati’ presents an even more restrained performance, with The Ex creeping on tip-toes through the undergrowth as Mekuria’s sax turns bewitching, arabesque shapes. ‘Yegna Mushera’ is another definite highlight, remaining similarly low key but somehow overpoweringly bright and reassuring, like the feeling of a joyous family reunion captured in sound.

As my fruity lingo perhaps indicates, this is supremely evocative music, in which the oft-intimidating technique of the players and the strict yet organic lines of the compositions swiftly give way to a heady, transportative effect. Far be it from me to try to define *where* it sends you, but it certainly does send you, and that is very much the point. If this does turn out to be Mekuria’s final recording, it’s a fittingly intense conclusion to an extraordinary career.

12. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – self titled
(Spectrum Spools)

From July:

“Before digging into these LPs, it’s helpful to read up on the methodology Evans used in constructing them. Basically, sides A, B and D were assembled from the kind of shorter pieces that have featured on her previous records, threaded together into twenty minute ‘suites’ in time-honoured ‘70s fashion. Side C – ‘Summer of the Cat’s Eye’ – meanwhile is a one-take live improvisation, and maybe that goes some way toward explaining why it’s my favourite track here. Not that the other sides aren’t great too of course, but ‘..Cat’s Eye’ is really something, by-passing the kind of snidey “sounds like..” comparisons used earlier in this review for a really engrossing trip into the unknown, steady tremoloed signals crashing headfirst into waves of chattering chaos and unknowable space-voices, like original series Star Trek unexpectedly drifting into a Tarkovsky-esque realm of terrifying alien beauty. So that’s pretty good.

As to the other tracks, the whole ‘suite’ concept seems the like kind of thing tailor made to annoy the hell out of me, given my general distaste for stop/start dynamics and liking for distinct, self-contained pieces of music, but in actual fact it works pretty well, to the extent that you probably wouldn’t notice the methodology if not informed in advance. The run-off from each ‘bit’ is nicely calibrated with the rise of the next, further building the established mood rather than upsetting it.
[…]
There is a kind of hermetic purity to Evans work that I think really sets her apart from the potential tedium of the ‘mystic synth explorer’ aesthetic. I may have thrown around plenty o’ names in the paragraphs above, but the truth is that there is absolutely NO “he he, yeah, Tangerine Dream dude” type intent going on here. It sounds instead as if she’s simply sitting down in front of her gear, taking a deep breath and firing it up to make some wide-screen, expressive music, the way it naturally comes out, filtered through the technology, not defined by it – and the celestial depths scraped by the results speak for themselves.”

11. Six Organs of Admittance – Ascent
(Drag City)

Who’d have thought it? A Six Organs record riding high on the list in 2012. After the best part of a decade spent pursuing pleasant but rather inconsequential psych-folky directions on a series of Drag City albums, Ben Chasny’s project would likely have remained very much in the corners of my radar, were it not for the announcement that ‘Ascent’ represents what is to all intents and purposes a reformation of Comets On Fire, a band whose singularly chaotic psychedelic tumult has been increasingly missed round these parts since they faded away sometime in the mid ‘00s.

As you might expect, erstwhile Comets leader Ethan Miller – still mired in the aftermath of Howlin’ Rain’s disastrous mess of a Rick Rubin produced un-breakthrough album – is strictly on second guitar here, following Chasny’s lead as we get a hefty glimpse of what CoF might have sounded like with the positions of the two guitar-slingers reversed. And what it might have sounded like is, you’ll be glad to hear, bloody stunning, as ‘WasWasa’ kicks in with the headiest brew of unashamed heavy-psych fret-mangling I’ve heard this year, afterburners roaring through a text-book perfect emergency descent into a hostile alien world, nerve-shredding solos blearing out like torpedoes across a fearsome High Tide/Pink Fairies groove. Fucking awesome, in other words.

‘A Thousand Birds’, an extended electric reworking of an ancient Six Organs acoustic number, follows suit, with the rhythm section of Ben Flashman and Utrillo Kushner locking down a fine Rallizes style eterno-groove over which Chasny can sprawl and sway as he pleases, intoning verses between cascades of chiming, electrified string texture to fine psychedelic effect – full bore star-dazed rock awesomeness that continues across the hulking landscapes of ‘Close To The Sky’ and ‘Even If You Knew’. Unlike Comets, the sound here is sharp and clear, with more of a progressive edge rounding off the fuzz (kinda matches the outer space concept art), but the playing and the instrument tones are mighty enough so roll with such precision, and the chaos and noise of earlier outings is rarely missed. Quite what all-purpose electronics/effects guy Noel Harmonson adds to proceedings I’m uncertain, but I’m assured that he’s in there somewhere.

A blinding album then, for the most part, but the problem (for me at least), comes when Chasny switches back to his regular solo mode for ‘Solar Ascent’ and the rather anaemic closer ‘Visions (From IO)’. He’s a cool guy and a phenomenal player, and there’s little wrong with these tunes as such, but personally I’ve never been fully sold on this side of his work, and his folkier musings have a slippery, silvery quality to them that I can’t help but find slightly contrived - too overtly studied, veering more toward ‘candle shop mood music’ than the private press cosmic revelations he’s no doubt aiming for.

Still though – for a good 70% of the run time, ‘Ascent’ hits the spot like a battering ram. More please! Official Comets reunion..? C’mon! I’d certainly buy the ticket.

Labels: best of 2012, Getatchew Mekuria, Mi Ami, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Six Organs of Admittance, The Choo Choo Trains, The Ex

Posted by: Ben / 2:22 PM (0) comments

Sunday, February 07, 2010

The Ex & Brass Unbound / Zun Zun Egui / John Butcher
Tufnell Park Dome, 03/02/10

The Dome in Tufnell Park is an odd place to be when itís two thirds empty. Not actually a dome in any fashion I can appreciate, it is room with a distinctly old fashioned air to it - something like a municipal drill hall operating in tandem with the village scout hall of it’s downstairs neighbour the Boston Music Room, where Billy Childish is still packing ‘em in one Friday night in most months, and long may he continue to do so. Where the downstairs is a generally rather comforting place to lurk though, the larger open space of the ‘Dome’ can’t help but add a certain low level malignancy to the atmosphere. A big, draughty hall essentially - the kind of place you’d imagine as the setting for a scary punk gig circa 1980, where they brought in extra muscle on the door but skinheads threatened to beat everybody up anyway, enraged by subconscious memories of primary school gym lessons, as The Lurkers or somebody stood on stage wondering why they bothered. Or such is the desultory picture that the history books and Billy Bragg songs paint for halls such as this anyway. Obviously I have no idea, I wasn’t there. Maybe the Tuffnell Park Dome was a shining beacon of happiness and hope during the Thatcher years. But I doubt it.

Anyway, no such anachronistic shenanigans are on display tonight, making me give thanks that I’m lucky enough to live in an age in which I’m extremely unlikely to get punched whilst attempting to watch men play guitars. And in a round-about sort of way, maybe it is the inclusive and forward-thinking spirit of bands like The Ex that I have to thank to thank for that..? Kinda? A bit? I don’t know whether or not they played in the UK when they were getting started as an anarcho/squatter affiliated buncha punks back in the ‘80s, but I guess if they did they might have experienced grim scenes of infamy such as those imagined above. Now though, all is relaxed, all is cordial, and all the world is one beneath a plastic cup full of Guinness as one of those Sublime Frequencies Asian radio pop CDs plays over the PA - jolly, magical tunes from Thailand or Korea or someplace, probably knocked out as filler for a domestic market where there weren’t enough Beatles records to go around, and now rediscovered by us over-saturated nth generation indie kids for whom THOUSANDS of Beatles records are only a few clicks away, appreciated on a whole new level cos it sounds so weird and cool and different, and , like, cos it’s wonderful how forty years of tape hiss and radio distortion make it all sound like one big, distant drone from an ancient party in another room where people long dead are having loads of fun.

This implied sense of respectful, fourth-world open-mindedness continues to prevail as John Butcher walks onstage alone, and is greeted not only with a complete lack of mockery or dismissal, but even a general lack of *talking* from this relatively rockist crowd in a relatively cavernous rock venue, as he presents a somewhat academic set of “hey guys, listen to these funny sounds I’ve learned how to make” style electro-acoustic improv. I don’t know about you, but I always find solo performances in a jazz/improv vein a bit of a hard sell. Regardless of how abstracted or abrasive things get, it’s always the aspect of ensemble playing that opens it up for me, the basic drama of musicians ricocheting around each other. I’m pretty sure I must have even seen John Butcher in that context in the past and enjoyed it, but when there’s just one guy up there on his own blurting noises into the void, it all gets a bit, well, y’know. More like watching a talented player doing his daily exercises in public than something we can really engage with.

That said, I’ve got nothing better to do at this point in the evening than sip my ale and pay attention, and some of the noises Mr. Butcher makes are very curious and nice. I especially appreciate his preference for playing short, distinct pieces rather than the twenty minute blowouts favoured by many of his peers, and to my mind this helps make his music a lot more approachable. He does some good stuff on his sax with some kinda didgeridoo style circular breathing creating a bit of a drone, although I’m less enamored with the results when he picks up a… shit, my horn recognition skills aren’t what they used to be - was it a soprano sax? Or a kind of clarinet? One of those smaller, straight ones anyway… and plays a sorta high-pitched birdcall medley. Too much treble, man! He also does a good bit where he angles the horn on his bigger sax around the mic to create a kind of rumbling, pedal-aided feedback that he manipulates into a sorta slow rhythm by clicking back and forth on the... what do you call the bits you push in and out on a saxophone? Valves? (honestly, you wouldn’t get this kind of crap from Nat Hentoff would you? And to think, I could probably draw the guitars of the last ten rock bands I saw from memory…) - it sounds terrific anyway, which is the point.

A point should be well-remembered by Zun Zun Egui, who are on next. Almost as soon as they got on stage and started tuning up, my internal alarm bells were ringing. “MUSOS”, I hissed, crushing my beer mug in my hand and destroying the feel-good vibes of the gig for all within earshot. Ok, obviously I didn’t do that, but you get the picture. I won’t begrudge it to ya if you like Zun Zun Egui, I’m sure they’re pretty great if you’re into what they’re doing, but stuck as I am at the moment on a uniform diet of three chord pop, mechanical 4/4 rhythms and repetitious noise, they are Not. My. Thing. At. All. Or, let’s put it this way: I suppose I currently like the idea that musicians should treat every note as it were a close friend, and I’m very much the kind of person who prefers to maintain a small, clearly defined group of close friends, so that significant time and rewarding engagement may be dedicated to each. Zun Zun Egui on the other hand are veritable social harlots, rushing around the octaves like party-mad bastards, but ultimately not making a great impression on any of the, er, tones they encounter along the way. Too many notes! Not that I have a kneejerk distrust of musicianship or anything you understand, it’s just that… I guess if all those notes are there, I want to hear them channeled into something monolithic and awesome, not just, y’know, played, and there are only fleeting glimpses of potential Frippian grandeur within this set. Of course, they’re too smart to ever sink on stage into the kind of morbid practice room ‘funk’ I was worried might manifest itself, but behind closed doors I dread to think what these guys get up to. They have that sort of self-absorbed “no we won’t stop playing, we’re so fucking good” swagger that makes me run for the hills.

Zun Zun Egui’s most distinctive feature is the singer/guitaristís habit of communicating via a startling Tropicalia-style affirmative yelping that he uses to try to incite dancing and excitement, apparently steadfast in the belief that he is playing the most powerful and sexy music imaginable and that we are callow, inhibited FOOLS for remaining still. I don’t wish to sound demeaning, cos I’ve gotta give it to the guy, he performs this role extremely well. But the intensity of his appeals can’t help but seem somewhat alarming in the context of lugubrious prog-rock in North London on a Wednesday evening, and it’s likely that if he were exhibiting similar enthusiasm from within the crowd, there’d probably be a ten foot gap opening around him in all directions and a doorman looking on wearily. The big question is of course: if this music was presented to me as some kind of dusty French or Brazilian early ‘70s artifact and reissued on 180gm vinyl on Finders-Keepers or something, would I think it was awesome? No comment.

Gee, that was a lot of words wasted on knocking down a perfectly well-meaning band - sorry. Best move straight on what we’re all here to see: perennial Dutch art-punk godheads The Ex, here accompanied by Brass Unbound, their own hand-picked quartet of European horn colossi. And holy shit, have they ever got a show in store for you.

Watching the above promo video for this tour earlier the same day, I was slightly taken aback to see what hard cases the brass contingent appear to be. They look like they could all be wrestlers or rugby players or something; certainly of a different cut from the kind of lily-livered males I’m more used to seeing on stage. This got me thinking about how saxophone players are often pretty big guys, and wondering whether this has anything to do with the physical demands of playing the instrument. But best leave that unrewarding train of thought burnt out at the side of the road and cut to the chase:

The Ex & Brass Unbound was fucking breathtaking.

A total hour of power, so loaded with climatic, fiery, cacophonous beauty, it sprawled straight over across the 80 minute mark and still left me feeling like it’d only just started. Righteous, rabble-rousing music, unshackled from genre and tradition pretty much entirely, but so primal and self-explanatory it could get everyone from the most haughty jazzbo to your granddad psyched up and ready for action.

It’s always been interesting to read interviews and stuff about The Ex’s DIY tours around Africa, and without getting too starry-eyed about it, a set like this really does give the impression that they could essentially pitch up anywhere in the world with their amps and just jam it out with whoever’s around, and people would GET IT. It’s angry music sure, and there are whole centuries and continents-worth of cultural upheaval buried within it, but so full of forward motion and universal ON-ness, it’s just undeniable. So much stuff to love within this performance, and I scarcely feel able to express any of it.

I love how The Ex, despite several decades-worth of experimentation, collaboration and global cross-pollination, are still unmistakably an anarcho-punk band front and centre, grinding out barre chords on distorted guitars and barking lyrics about global warming and surveillance society like the European answer to Fugazi they essentially are, but just keeping it open enough for all the other influences and musicians to filter in around them.

I love how despite having no less than seven serious-minded men up front, all blurting, hammering and sweating away with all the gusto of a construction team, The Ex & Brass Unbound never sound macho or blustery or overbearing. Quite an achievement for a group with mr. elephantine death-rattle himself Mats Gustafsson in the line-up! Their sound is a lean, sinuous, breathing thing, full of sparks and always moving forward, propelled not by a motorik march or by syncopated funk in any way we’d conventionally understand it, but by a sort of lurching, unstoppable, ramshackle force, like a boulder crashing down a mountainside.

Much credit for this must go to drummer Katherina Bornefeld, who is simply an amazing presence, her style is sometimes as unconventional and post-punk instinctive as Palmolive on the Raincoats records, but solid and muscular enough to keep all these rampaging guitar n’ hornslingers ON MESSAGE, heading in the right direction. And when she takes the mic and sings - for an adaptation of a Hungarian folk song, and another number later in the set - it’s stunning. Her voice cuts straight through the sea of instruments, sounding like some haunting, baleful lament pulled straight off a hundred year old Eastern European folk recording. Every musician on stage gets the chance to deliver similar moment of glory though. Terrie Hessels clatters away on his battle-scarred five string guitar in a completely inimitable fashion, essentially fulfilling both the rhythm and bass roles in this bass-less three guitar line-up, whilst also finding time to throw in outbursts of amusical skronk wild enough to make my hair stand on end.

Obviously I never saw The Ex with their now departed singer G.W. Sok, but Arnold De Boer seems to make for a fine and imaginative replacement. Weirdly enough, De Boer used to essentially BE the fuzzy nerd-pop band Zea, whose album “Counting Backwards Leads To Explosions” I picked up and really liked a few years back. Seeing him fronting The Ex seems crazily unlikely – it’s like if Major Matt Mason from Schwervon became the new singer in Crass or something – but it’s great to see that he seems to have carried across some of the lo-fi toy keyboard rocking antics of his former band, furthering the idea that The Ex operate like a kind of cultural sponge, absorbing anything and everything into their central framework the name of continued awesomeness.

Roy Paci is my pick from the horn section – he’s bloody beautiful on the trumpet, playing with real guts and humour and warmth, and I’d love to see him let rip in a more traditional jazz context. Ken Vandermark on sax comes a close second though, and as for Wolter Wierbos on the trombone, well… have you ever seen a man hunched forward and violently hopping up and down whilst playing the trombone? An easy enough idea to convey on paper perhaps, but just try to picture it - imagine the physics for Christ’s sake!

I hope this doesn’t make me sound obsessive or mildly autistic, but after years of trying to write about music, I find that when I’m watching a band or listening to a record, I’ve often got a separate track of back-chat going on in the back of my brain as I come up with daft observations and descriptors I could maybe later use to write about or discuss it – don’t blame me, I don’t do it consciously, it just happens, ok? Usually this stuff is little more than an annoyance, but I always know I’m at a REALLY good gig when it goes into overdrive and my synapses start throwing out ridiculous crap that’s NEVER going to be fit to print, on the level of some kind of opium reverie.

After The Ex & Brass Unbound finished off one particularly fiery number prominently featuring Paci and Wierbos, I found myself taking a step backwards and thinking;

“Holy shit! That sounded like Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western brass section riding into town on a fucking tank made out of Mussolini’s bones!”

Lunacy, clearly. I mean, a single skeleton, even one belonging to a big fellow like Mussolini, would never provide enough surface area to construct any kind of vehicle, let alone a tank. But if I had to swear to it in court, I’d still have to say that that is EXACTLY what the song sounded like.

All things considered, I’m afraid that Dead Moon are still the band Iíd most like to see out the apocalypse with. I’d feel more comfortable in a smaller, more self-sufficient group like theirs, I think. But when that ragtag army of nomads and punks gets together to stampede into your capitalist enclave and burn it to the ground, like a rather more affirmative version of Tom Savini and his pals in ‘Dawn Of The Dead’, well make no mistake, it’s THE EX who are gonna be belting it out from the back of a flatbed truck with a portable generator, in the spirit of general chaotic celebration.

PHEW.

*collapses*