RECENT LISTENING #14

Mac Blackout, Angus MacLise, Lake of Dracula, Shuggie Otis, MV & EE and the Bummer Road, the Watt from Pedro Show with special guest Tom Smith

MAC BLACKOUT Love Profess LP (TROUBLE IN MIND) Whoah, I feel like Byron Coley on Twitter the other day, this is not what I expected this brand new LP to sound like. Then again, I’m pretty clueless in general, and had really only previously heard Mac Blackout with his band the Functional Blackouts, and only on a mere 7-inch that I still have somewhere and is now probably over 10 years old. For those few minutes I found them a weird and interesting band, but nonetheless a vocals/guitar/bass/drums punk band, and in that sense still pretty traditional. Well, Mac Blackout solo is not that. On his new album Love Profess, the songs are all instrumentals, and built from keyboards and drum machines, a little bit of space/fuzz guitar, and a lot of heroic wild saxophone playing. Coley compared Blackout’s keyboard/drumbox settings to Suicide, and I would say yes, though perhaps even more so like some of Martin Rev’s relatively gentler solo music, just a little bit more soda-shop/bubble-gum, in a …