a too late catch up part three: monopoly child star searchers: son volt: bong / quttinirpaaq: neil young: sun araw / predator vision
in a wonderland they lie, dreaming as the days go by, dreaming as the summers die: ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam. life, what is it but a dream?
monopoly child star searchers: prince of parrot shooters
skaters spencer clark fifth generation magnetic tape floop and jungle clatter glued together by ethnicky twinklings and terry riley’s beard twine. it jumps and scratches like some arabesque psychedout godard musical. it sounds like the mental wheezing of cheap whistles, recorders and chanters all going wonkilly off at the same time. still prefer this solo stuff to the skaters proper jobs.
son volt: american central dust
son volt still sounds like what uncle tupelo used to sound like just with the distorto amplitude turned a wee bit down (which is what i prefer anyway). jay farrar still writes songs in the vein of steinbeck, still writes about booze and broken hearts and dreams, about small town disappointments and how the machine will grind you down and fuck you over. it’s proper american, proper country, proper old fashioned music. none of which is meant in the pejorative.
what d’ya think yr gonna get with a band called bong. and a song called exhalation. sweet leaf! yup distinct whiff of weed about this slow burning nod of fuzzy twang. imagine a musical monstrosity where sleep jams with ravi shankar. it’s so fucking wrong. but it feels so right.
the unpronounceable sludge of quttinirpaaq continues in much the same vein just upping the freakout bad vibes a bit more. like dylan carson mid heroin slump. it takes a fucking age to get going and lumbers around the room oozing malevolent chug from yr speakers. thicker than tar and twice as chewy.
just something he chucked out in a spare half hour. an almost concept album about driving yr automobile or something. fizzes around between barroom boogie and typical youngesque squall and at times sounds like he’s morphed into the velvet underground. that said when he does his own thang, i miss crazy horse…
sun araw / predator vision: split
more split vinyl action. this time keenans hypnagogic pop in full swing. like ducktails evil cousin sun araw spew out squall like sunshine through a grimy window. imagine a semi-coherent starving weirdoes (if there’d be any point to that) forcing cosmic blues through speaker stax as big as eddie murphys career in the eighties. fucking loving this.
ducktails mondanile and a few others smoke a big bowl of fm soft rock and filter it through a crazy space-visor. has a bit of a brittle neil youngish vibe that i kinda wish fork in the road had. this fairly rattles along anyway with a big krauty vicious klang before morphing predator style into cosmic vu stomp and twang and then into some feebacking skynyrd sky boogie.
normal service resumes shortly…
