RECENT LISTENING #36
Gray/Smith, Mammal, John McGuire, Gub, Tojo Yamamoto, Hatchers, Dan Melchior & Jim Marlowe, Chocolate Monk December 2023 roundup
GRAY/SMITH s/t LP (COLOPHON) The self-titled debut LP by Gray/Smith is one of those times where I get a record, dig it, almost immediately write a long heartfelt review which comes out almost perfectly in the very first draft, and I’m just about to publish it . . . and then for some reason lose all the work. Substack auto-save glitch, user error, the ole ‘same draft open on more than one device and the cached edits are different’ snafu, who knows. This happened almost two years ago (Gray/Smith was released in May 2022) and I haven’t had the heart to try another review, but I sure have listened to it a bunch since then, and I’m listening to it again right now, loving it as much as I did when I wrote the first review, the way it opens with long minutes of in-the-pocket all-instrumental guitar-and-drums country/folk/rock/progressive saunter so extended and patient that it has hypnotized at least one close listener into remembering all of Side A as being instrumental, which is very understandable given that vocalist/guitarist Llilw “L” Gray doesn’t sing until what seems like the very last minute. There is more singing than that on Side B, but it remains a subdued presence and not the focal point of the music. When it happens, the music does indeed live up to Gray’s one-word description as quoted in the one-sheet by B. Coley: “country.” Just listen to the words and melody and voice when they finally come in on side A’s wistful and slightly twangy chorus of “nobody likes sad songs/but since you went away/it seems like a sad song/is all I can play,” or the penultimate song “Walk Right Back” kicking off with the Hank-referent “I want you to tell me why you walked out on me/I’m so lonesome every day/I want you to know that since you walked out on me/nothing seems to be the same old way.” It’s country alright, but it’s a lot of other things too, and the heart of the music is always in those steadily roaming instrumental passages and how they’re grooved perfectly by the wide-open pocket drumming of Rob Smith. But wait, I’ve listened to this record 15 times, and just now for the first time I’ve stared at the center labels, the only place where songwriting credits are listed, and see that most of the parts with vocals, including everything I just quoted, are all cover songs. I’m also just now noticing that even though the record is made solely by the duo of Gray and Smith, on just guitar, vocals, and drums, the album opener “Haven Esplanade” has at least two guitar tracks throughout, presumably both played by Gray via the magic of multitrack overdubbing, but so tasteful and judicious are the arrangement choices, the music still so easily imagined as being arranged for a duo, that I didn’t know or care. Either way they create an expansive wide-screen situation throughout, and if this is country, it goes beyond the Oxford’s fourth definition of the word (“short for ‘country music’”) and expands well into the third (“an area or region with regard to its physical features”) while all along the way passing into and out of the second (“districts and small settlements outside large towns, the cities, or the capital”).
MAMMAL Deserted LP (IMPERMANENCE) Brand new one from Mammal, whom I first reviewed in that palindromic year of 2002, which is 22 years ago as of this writing. At the time Gary Beauvais, who has been recording solo music as Mammal on and off ever since the late 1990s, was just about to release the Fog Walkers LP on the Scratch ‘n’ Sniff label, an album which exemplified and helped prototype a weird driving “noise techno” style which would be later heard more popularly by all sorts of people, perhaps most notably Ren Schofield’s Container project. Mammal/Beauvais always seemed to be coming from a more genuinely antisocial place, however, and after a few years of steadily dwindling activity in which their sporadic online messaging and DIY branding seemed increasingly gloomy and despondent, including a release bluntly titled Let Me Die (2006, Animal Disguise), Mammal began a heavy aesthetic shift on a double LP called Lonesome Drifter (2007, Animal Disguise), a shift away from the ostensibly more outward dance/techno/electronic beat-grids and/or harsh noise sandtraps into a deeply-inward one-man doom-metal whisper-folk direction. Still extremely heavy music, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I listened to Lonesome Drifter even more than Fog Walkers, and a subsequent album of Lonesome Drifter outtakes called Distant Days (2008, IDES Recordings) and another doom-folk followup called Lake and Sand (2015, Ormolycka) just as much. Even if the lyrics could get troublingly direct (a song that begins “would you still love me/if I died by my own hand?”) the music was so uniquely saturated with feeling — the melancholy and depressive mood of living for days without talking to anyone, looking out the window at still gray weather and/or cold rain and/or gloomy land and water. Distant days, lake and sand. This brand new one Deserted (2024, Impermanence) is the first thing I’ve heard from Mammal since Lake and Sand, and it picks up right where that one left off, in the same mood-saturated stadium-closet doom-folk mold. (I often think of a description of the Dead C’s White House LP in a 1997 issue of the fanzine Nest of Ninnies: “stadium music for people who live in cupboards.”) Apparently there is no guitar or bass on Deserted, as it was recorded only with a drum machine and a single 35-year-old keyboard, the latter so thickly distorted it might as well be a guitar, but the sound is a bit more monochromatic and bereft of air vibration than what you get from a stringed instrument, even a heavily processed one. Still, this monochromaticity is perhaps the ultimate Mammal statement, his album most effectively saturated with that Mammal feeling.
JOHN McGUIRE Vanishing Points/A Cappella LP (UNSEEN WORLDS) Wild to just bump into a minimalism LP from 30-40 years ago on my own, without Alan Licht hipping me to it first! Maybe because, even though the music was recorded in the 80s and 90s, it was only released here in the U.S.A. as an import-only CD in 2002, and now in 2023 on a domestic CD and LP by the Unseen Worlds label (to whom I’ll be forever grateful for their Expanding Universe and Out of the Blue reissues alone). It may also be because the A side “Vanishing Points” falls a bit short, cycling and burbling organ patterns ad nauseum for 26 minutes without much rhyme or reason. The notes and patterns all seem to be based on one chord/scale, which is a minimalist concept as far as harmony goes, but the lack of minimalist concept for the piece’s rhythmic and melodic approaches leads to endless organ-note salad. Side B “A Cappella” on the other hand has fantastic minimalist concepts for all approaches, harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic, a beautiful 23-minute splash of originality based on lovely samples of McGuire’s wife Beth Griffith’s singing voice. I could be wrong, and I could’ve read the liner notes first, but it sounds like McGuire is taking a few particular cuts of her singing a specific wordless angelic pitch, along with his keyboard playing, maybe no more than six or seven different notes on a scale, and arranging them into one or two longer-form melodic movements that repeat over and over for the duration of the piece. It’s also very long at 23 minutes, but delicate and hypnotic enough to easily listen to for longer.
GUB s/t LP (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) A hype sticker tells us that GUB is Beau Wanzer and Champagne Mirrors, and the A side tells us that Champagne Mirrors is Alex Barnett. Wanzer and Barnett have been moving around electronic music circles in Chicago for quite awhile, subscenes where the tinkerers are mostly in their labs, emergence is low-key and underground, and nothing happens too fast. Speaking of not too fast, the music on this entire album is very midtempo to downright slow. The tracks develop slowly or barely at all. It’s not for dance floors, it’s for . . . not sure. Staring at your half-empty seventh beer and pondering how you don’t even feel drunk but you do have a shitty headache? Either way, it’s not party music. There are cool nuances in the nooks and crannies of the tracks, like when the drum machines start clapping back in the last couple minutes of the 7m39s opener (I guess it’s called “Gub 1”), but overall this stuff is very lugubrious.
TOJO YAMAMOTO 山本東条 10” (FORBIDDEN PLACE) From one Larry to another, lead singer Larry Joe Treadway of the raw wrestling-rock band Tojo Yamamoto sent in their new 10” with the title 山本東条. This band is notable because the guitarist is Elwood Francis, who you might know from his brave filling of the mighty bass-guitar-playing shoes of Dusty Hill in current touring incarnations of ZZ Top, but back to “wrestling-rock”: what I mean is a hard/garage rock style that goes all the way back to the Dictators and even further back to the “Crusher” 45 by The Novas, of course. And yes, I’m saying “wrestling-rock” because the band name Tojo Yamamoto comes from the name of a professional wrestler and Larry Joe’s vocals shout and growl and menace like any good professional heel should. Other than that, they’re in the lineage of heavy-guitar 2000s weird-punk like the Mayyors and certain things on Load Records. They also remind me of my beloved Cows. Record closer “The Sugar Hold” is not unlike the Cows’ massive 1995 song “Witch Hunt,” and while the Cows are less explicitly wrestling-rock, Shannon Selberg’s entire career as their vocalist could be considered as one extended heel turn.
HATCHERS Spectral Lines CD (HEAT RETENTION/SEND HELP) Hey, it’s Brian Osborne of Lexington, Kentucky via New York City. He’s an avant-garde jazz/new music drummer/percussionist who probably only the deepest early-21st-C. diggers into highly variable noise guh will remember as the drummer/percussionist and possibly bandleader of a scorched-earth post-indie avant-jazz unit based in NYC called the George Steeltoe Ensemble. I remember I raved about their 2006 album Church of Yuh at Blastitude.com, as did Thurston Moore and/or Byron Coley in their Bull Tongue column, and that was about it. Well here it is, like 17 goddamn years later and Osborne is still doing work, here on a 2018 release by a duo called Hatchers where Michael Roy Barker throws down experimental electronics and Osborne threads into them with his needling percussion forming various ensuing and compounding latticeworks. Sometimes it’s gotta be one or the other playing solo, or maybe it never is — the calmly boiling inner human alien landscapes remain.
DAN MELCHIOR & JIM MARLOWE Footprints in the Men’s Room CD (NEWTON’S KIDNEY) Someone forgot to tell Dan Melchior & Jim Marlowe that they’re not actually some duo combination of Dieter Moebius and/or Hans-Joachim Roedelius jamming with Werner "Zappi" Diermaier and/or Jean-Hervé Péron, which means they went ahead and busted out 30-odd minutes of garage-kosmiche instrumentals for electronics and guitar and put it on a CD and Bandcamp anyway. To put a more contemporary spin on it, I’m also getting a distinct Neil Campbell/Astral Social Club/electro-Vibracathedral whiff when I hear the way Dan & Jim do the astral bandwidth overload thing. What Neil et al don’t do is make room for soulful electric lead guitar playing. But hey, it fits! And a key “Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles”-ish centerpiece track, the penultimate “Orlando to Macon,” seems to have no electric guitar leads at all.
CHOCOLATE MONK December 2023 roundup. All of us Bananafishermen out here still trawling this Great Sea of Sound have been well aware of the Chocolate Monk label, at least since the year 1995 which is when I personally first learned about proprietor Dylan Nyoukis and his then-current band Prick Decay in the 10th issue of Bananafish magazine, but did any of you maniacs know Choc Monk is so prolific to this day that they’ve just released six brand new albums in this single month we’re currently experiencing aka December 2023? And that the first one of those six, Sprinkle of Blunder (pictured above) by the post-LAFMS brain-scramble quartet Points of Friction featuring Joseph Hammer and Damian Bisciglia (and a couple other guys who may have never been featured in Bananafish) is the 600th release on the label? Which means the label has never really stopped releasing stuff in these ensuing 28 years? The 601st release is Positively Susan by Karen Constance, a single killer soft-scrape slow-developing 26-minute track. The 602nd is Harmony Hollywood by Robert Millis, and I had just been praising his 2010 solo CD called 120, so hearing this new one is quite welcome and not dissimilar, despite being recorded 12 years later in 2022. It is more openly guitaristic than anything on 120 (other than that album’s closing track), while still not being overly guitaristic at all, and nearly as dreamscaped ambient as 120. The 603rd release on Chocolate Monk is Wonder How It Left by Tongue Depressor, the Connecticut-based duo of Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden, “one track of duo organ and one of cello/bagpipe to levitate your weary arse.” And finally, the 604th release on Chocolate Monk is a good old-fashioned compilation album called Calibre 3, a veritable label sampler if you will, and it’s all too much to process in just one record review. I can’t believe I even made it this far, and I do encourage you to check it out for yourself (though it looks like these are all sold out already because it took me four months to publish this review). I also just came across a Grey Windowpane release on Chocolate Monk from this year, a CDR called Abracujo, the 593rd release on the label, which means they’ve put out at least 12 releases in 2023 alone, damn…