16 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I am not sure if I am very late to the party on Croatian Amor or unintentionally getting in at exactly the right time, but Loke Rahbek's latest album has sneakily become one of my favorite releases of the year.  I suspect I would have missed Love Means Taking Action entirely had it not been co-released on Luke Younger's largely unerring Alter imprint, as Rahbek seems to have built a career out of being a shape-shifting enigma, leaving a large and varied discography of noise, power electronics, black metal, and dark wave behind him, most of which has surfaced on his own excellent Copenhagen-based Posh Isolation label (though he has also turned up in few Sacred Bones acts as well).  Also significant: Croatian Amor releases generally tend to have some kind of half-pornographic/half-conceptual motif suggestive of more harsh quasi-industrial fare.  As a result, I was quite surprised to discover that Love Means Taking Action most closely resembles the genre-fluid and dreamy Romanticism of prime This Mortal Coil.  It is anything but a nostalgic pastiche though, as Rahbek manages to capture the elusive feel of those albums while still doing something quite unusual and unique.

Posh Isolation/Alter

It is probably impossible to discuss this album without mentioning that the last significant Croatian Amor release was conceptually quite a provocative one, as 2014's The Wild Palms cassette was only available in exchange for a full-frontal nude photo of yourself.  Unsurprisingly, I do not have that release.  I hesitate to say that Rahbek has mellowed at all since then, but the conceptual side of Love Means Taking Action is a bit more accessible (if less erotic): he is freely sharing the raw material of the album in hopes that others will transform it into something of their own (a challenge that has at least been taken up by Drew McDowall and Felicia Atkinson thus far). It is admittedly a very good idea, especially since Love Means Taking Action has a very strong, instantly recognizable, and extremely malleable theme in the opening "An Angel Gets His Winged Clipped" courtesy of an unnamed female vocalist.  The same beautiful refrain explicitly appears again in more chopped and distorted form in "Like Angel," but it is entirely possible that it is unrecognizably strewn all over the whole album in various mutated incarnations, as a lot of heavy lifting is done with warped, layered, pitch-shifted, and cut-up vocals.  Stylistically, Rahbek has dabbled in very similar fare on past Croatian Amor albums, but Love Means Taking Action explores that thread in a much more cohesive and sustained way.  Also, Rahbek has largely jettisoned most of the recognizably contemporary synth and noise textures normally found on Croatian Amor releases to give Love a more timeless and "vintage 4AD" feel.

Much like a good This Mortal Coil album, these twelve pieces work best as a languorously flowing and gently hallucinatory whole.  It is hard to pick out a strong single, but that is not for lack of strong material.  Rather, Love Means Taking Action feels like beautifully lush reverie that periodically blossoms into more structured and memorable hooks.  In a perverse way, this is a brilliantly crafted and darkly sensual pop album that has been collaged, blurred, and stretched into fuzzy narcotic abstraction.  The closest Rahbek comes to a would-be hit is probably the understated and sexy "Any Life You Want," which marries a stark kick-drum pulse to clipped, decontextualized, and soulful female vocals and an erratically warbling and fluttering synth motif.  Rahbek displays pitch-perfect instincts and impressive lightness of touch throughout the piece, maintaining a deliciously enigmatic and erotic unresolved tension that never overstays its welcome or breaks its bleary nocturnal spell.  My favorite piece is a bit less immediately gratifying, however, as "Like Angel" takes a few minutes to fully catch fire.  Initially, it feels like a bit of hissing and meandering drone piece with some odd symphonic flourishes, but it improbably breaks into an especially tender and striking reprise of the album’s opening vocal theme around the two-minute mark.  Then, it remarkably gets even better, as Rahbek twists and layers that theme into beautiful new shapes.  Admittedly, it ends far too soon for my liking, but I am happy enough that it simply exists.  Elsewhere, the closing title piece is yet another wonderful surprise, unleashing a poignantly melodic synthesizer motif that feels like the climactic scene of a perfect and imaginary ‘80s John Hughes film.

This is the rare album where I have absolutely nothing to critical to say at all, as Rahbek does not make a single false move anywhere, displaying both a distinct knack for crafting great hooks and the vision to apply them to a sensuous and shadowy collage experiment that is all his own.  While a few of the shorter interludes are not particularly memorable, that seems to be entirely by design, as Love Means Taking Action is a masterfully sequenced whole that sustains a precariously dreamlike illusion for its duration while still finding seductive new shades of mood for each fresh piece.  I like every single goddamn song here–I think that only happens once a year, at best.  Love Means Taking Action is everything I could want in an album seamlessly blurred together into a sexy, sad, flickering, experimental, and warmly hallucinatory tour de force.

Samples:

• Any Life You Want
• Like Angel
• Love Means Taking Action

 

16 April 2012

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Functioning nicely as a teaser for the upcoming Half Blood full length on Relapse, this two track 7" sees Jenks Miller further indulging in the traditional minimalist sound that has underscored much of his previous work, but also a more overt embracing of his southern rock roots.

Brutal Panda

Miller also performs in alt-country band Mount Moriah, and that bit of southern twang bleeds over into "On The Eclipse".Meshing straight ahead southern rock with acoustic guitar pop and traditional keyboard sounds, the song musically feels far more conventional than I had expected, with the exception of Miller's growly demon vocals.The appearance of an extended guitar solo and spacey keyboards pushes the piece into a krautrock dimension in the latter half.However, the track never loses the mantra-like repetition that Horseback has always done so well, coming out in a tightly disciplined structure.

On the flip side, "Broken Orb" more fully embraces that classically minimalist sound, mixing ambient keyboards with slow, repetitive guitar layers.Other than the distant, gunshot like percussion, the track stays in a meditative, calm place throughout its seven minute duration.

I'm feeling the more rock (as opposed to metal) sound Horseback has been working with recently.Not that there's anything wrong with metal, but that combination of traditional rock instrumentation with the minimalism that’s more Charlemagne Palestine than Sunn O))) becomes a more unique beast when everything comes together.If this is a preface for Half Blood, it's going to be an awesome one.Plus, this single comes with a Horseback branded vinyl cleaning cloth, which is an odd bonus.

samples:

• On The Eclipse
• Broken Orb

 

16 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Two new side-projects from Locrian guitarist Andre Foisy, the former with David Reed (Envenomist) on keyboards, and the latter a live improvisation trio with Mike Weis (Zelienople) on percussion and Neil Jendon on synths. While the two are distinct projects and releases, there is a certain shared tense bleakness that exists between the two cassettes.

Brave Mysteries, Accidental Guest

Foisy and Reed’s collaboration is perhaps the one that sounds the most like Foisy's other work, though it stands on its own.The clear, morose keyboard tone atop distant guitar feedback on "Sootfall and Fallout" reminded me a lot of the Apocalypse Now soundtrack, in the best possible way, and Foisy's disembodied screaming adds to that feeling of madness and confusion.

"Ordovician" is not all that dissimilar, but the trumpeting synths and dark, jagged guitar playing gives the entire work a dark majesty that is hard to deny.Even when the closing moments of acoustic guitar seem to drift into brighter territories, there’s still enough squealing feedback and inhuman growls that keep things evil.

The final and longest piece, "Seven Before the Throne," clocks in at over 20 minutes, spreads itself out over the duration while bringing in a slow, malignant feel.The chaos ebbs and flows, like a wave of darkness that covers everything, only rescinding slowly to come back once again.Foisy's guitar eventually comes in, initially as clear individual notes rather than his usual dense distorted clusters.Slowly but surely the track becomes more and more dissonant until finally exploding into a full on singing wall of noise.

In contrast, the trio of Kwaidan's live improvisation feels less focused, but not in a bad way.Opening with sampled strings, there's an erratic, but still structured quality to them, with shrieking feedback like an collapsing metal foundry.Sporadic percussion appears here and there, propelling the performance along with a messy shamble.

At times the mix verges on chaotic and formless, before opening up to allow in more space, allowing in pure guitar to balance out the swelling synths.The performance cycles between ambient space and ambiguous chaos a few more times before coming to its conclusion.

While both of these releases are strong in their own right, I would have to give the edge to Eolomea's tighter structure and composition.The three tracks on that tape feel more fleshed out and fully realized, while at times Kwaidan occasionally drifts into a directionless space, even though those moments are few and far between.

samples:

• Sootfall and Fallout
• Seven Before The Throne
• Kwaidan (Excerpt 1)
• Kwaidan (Excerpt 2)

 

16 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

With scores of releases both solo & in collaboration that stretch back for more than 20 years, Richard Youngs perhaps needs the least amount of introduction of any of the artists Root Strata has worked with. We're extremely excited to help Richard add another singular entry into his discography. Core To The Brave hits with a shock and never lets up. Composed of what appears to be blown out bass & spastic drum rhythms, these tracks cascade into shimmering loops of distortion, their weight reaching a critical mass that often feels likes it's on the verge of ecstatic collapse. Everything is elevated further in & up by that one and only voice, floating over top like a lush wind come down from the mountains.

More information here.

16 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Ohio-based noise veteran Mike Shiflet’s decomposed visions were put into crystal clear focus on 2011's Sufferers, and Merciless is that record’s seismic companion piece. Shiflet's expertise in the field of experimental noise music has been shown on a whole host of albums, collaborations and hyper-limited releases but has rarely been framed so succinctly as on this duo of records.

Continuing Sufferers’ exploration into grim, teeth-chattering tape manipulation and drone we are introduced to the landscape of Merciless with the hospital-room grind of "Feeble Breaths," a dense slab of guitar plucks, compressed air coughs and dentists drill squeals. These sounds are crafted into grit, drone and white noise to create a slowly shifting dense wall of oddly familiar sound. It isn't all doom and gloom however, as Shiflet manages to show his tender side on the meltingly epic "Exodus and Exile" which might be his most beautiful composition to date. A cascade of synthesizer tones that echo the most haunting moments of Ligeti or even Arvo Part, this is somehow all underpinned by a sense of imminent dread. A dread which Shiflet cashes in on the album's title track, an extended collaboration with noise superstar C Spencer Yeh, who matches his signature violin abuse with Shiflet's shimmering electro-acoustic treatments.

Merciless is an unrelenting piece of work, and all the better for it. Let it sink in and prepare to have your mind prized open, you won’t regret it.

More information here.

15 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As Julia Holter's second full-length in less than 8 months, Ekstasis has a good deal of anticipation on its shoulders. Last year's Tragedy was her big splash into the experimental music pond, packed with high-brow conceptualism that made perfect sense given her academic background in electronic composition. On Ekstasis, Holter steps into the spotlight with an entirely different take on her sound.

RVNG Intl.

In the same way Tragedy was Julia Holter's big artistic statement, Ekstasis is her big pop statement—a sprightly collection of ten crystalline, melodic, easily approachable songs. One listen to both albums back-to-back, and the differences are stark: with Ekstasis, Holter sands off the rough edges from Tragedy's labyrinthine song structures, obtuse drone and instrumental passages, and near-complete lack of earworm hooks. Given that I consider Art and Pop to be complimentary facets of the same gem ("Art Pop"), Ekstasis sounds like a natural extension of Holter's talents, if a surprising left turn given how difficult a listen Tragedy could be at times.

Ekstasis is centered on Holter's layered vocals and fluid, melodic keyboard playing. Nearly every song has a passage that is catchy, immediately hummable. Ambient sounds are now folded into traditional song structures, rather than featured in equal or greater measure to pop moments. Instruments that were prominently featured on Tragedy, like saxophone, are pared back to emphasize Holter's keyboard and vocal prowess, which is accentuated by her current three-piece live setup. (NPR recently streamed her debut NYC performance live from Le Poisson Rouge; I'll admit to tuning in from Texas and being utterly transfixed.) In short, Ekstasis is easy to love from the first spin; there is no steep listening curve. For anyone new to Holter's music, this is an obvious entry point into her sound-world.

Sequencing is key; Holter kicks off the album with three of its strongest melodies. "Marienbad" opens with her voice layered onto itself in a deceptively simple melodic sequence, as delicate as tiptoeing in fresh snow. When the full melody unfolds at the two-minute mark, it feels like watching a time-lapse video of a flower blooming in third grade science class—a cycle of beauty coming and going with each day's sun. Trumpets accent the song's stately charm. "Our Sorrows" lives up to its name, with its central melody more resigned, sorrowful, like a sigh transmitted onto sheet music. "In the Same Room" is one of the album's most lovable pieces, segueing into the mostly instrumental "Boy in the Moon" and vaguely Eastern-tinged "Für Felix" to close out the album's first half.

Side two begins with an initial reprise of Tragedy's great centerpiece, "Goddess Eyes," reframed in a choral music context, as if sung by a small choir comprised entirely of Holters. After floating through two more ambient pop gems, including the glimmering, underneath-the-stars glow of "Moni Mon Amie," "Goddess Eyes" is again reprised, this time sounding more like the vocoder-ized version from Tragedy. In its two appearances on Ekstasis, however, its context among other straightforward songs on a pop-leaning album makes it less of a focal point than on Tragedy. While "Goddess Eyes" is essentially one catchy refrain played out to lovely effect, there are stronger songs on Ekstasis. By my judgment, "Four Gardens" and "In the Same Room" are knockouts by comparison; if they don't contain quite as memorable a single lyric ("I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry"), they make up for it in sheer melodic content and overwhelming emotional pull.

There are no ambitious underpinnings like on Tragedy, which based its song cycle on Euripedes' ancient Greek play Hippolytus—a bit overly conceptual for my tastes. Because of its sequencing, which leans toward melody at the start, then intersperses key passages of ambience within the songs' melodic centers (and vice versa), Ekstasis feels like it has a natural start, middle, and end, like the narrative arc of a novel. It's not terribly difficult to find reference points for what Holter is doing with her music, yet it feels utterly fresh, like she's combined elements of so much music that I love—Kate Bush's most abstract work, Cocteau Twins, Broadcast (R.I.P.), Stars of the Lid, Grouper's rare sun-kissed moments, Julianna Barwick, Mark Hollis' one perfect solo album—and fashioned them into her own distinct sound. (I'm sure Holter would cite entirely different reference points if pressed, but that's my two cents.) Ekstasis is a major step for Holter—perhaps not a step forward or backward, but a sidestep, a bold change in direction; an impressive move in today's fickle musical landscape.

Samples:

• Marienbad
• F√ºr Felix
• Four Gardens

15 April 2012

Albums and Singles

As Julia Holter's second full-length in less than 8 months, Ekstasis has a good deal of anticipation on its shoulders. Last year's Tragedy was her big splash into the experimental music pond, packed with high-brow conceptualism that made perfect sense given her academic background in electronic composition. On Ekstasis, Holter steps into the spotlight with an entirely different take on her sound.

Read more …

15 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Julia Holter's debut is finally in prime position to reach a wider audience; given the broad appeal of her 2012 album, Ekstasis, to the NPR listening set, Tragedy has been graciously granted a CD pressing. If anything, the pop leanings of Ekstasis reinforce the otherworldliness of Tragedy, which remains a world all its own, conceptually daunting, rich in texture but a difficult entry point into Holter's music.

Night School (CD) / Leaving (LP/digital)

Tragedy opens with "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art," which incorporates gently oscillating electronics, mournful strings, and static ambience that rises and falls like an ocean tide. There are occasional swells of guitar drone and Julia Holter's wordless vocals float in and out of the mix like a specter, sometimes indistinguishable from the machines fluttering around it. Halfway into the song, an insistent pulse draws a melodic frame for Holter's words, quoting from Euripedes' Greek play Hippolytus: "Try to make yourself a work of art like me / you can't / see? / only me." Clattering percussion rises up around her voice: "What your mind, so sound and safe, cannot know / this was my plot." In its final minute, the song fades back to gentle ambience, then silence.

If this sounds conceptually ambitious, even a bit overwrought, well, it is. Tragedy is a collection of songs that are such an artistic stretch for Holter, especially for her first full-length LP, that the album is simultaneously charming, captivating, and overreaching. Upon its release last August, the album generated so much hype in underground music circles that it topped Boomkat's end-of-year list, selling out its initial 500-count LP pressing in mere days. (A second pressing this year sold out even faster.) Holter has now released her second album—this year's pop-oriented Ekstasis—and I doubt she will venture back to the grandiose, left-field drama of Tragedy in future years, given her newer album's steps toward melodic accessibility.

As the album continues, "The Falling Age" begins with light-as-air vocals that sound nicked from Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place (one of last year's great overlooked albums) before dissolving into a long stretch of processed strings and Type Records-worthy drone. "Goddess Eyes" is Tragedy's lone pop moment, filtering its most memorable lyric ("I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry") through a Daft Punk-style vocoder, looping it in the background while Holter intones another line from the scene of Hippolytus' fall over and over: "But in your dying you are dear to me." As a doorway into Holter's world, "Goddess Eyes" is flawless, so much so that she reprises it—twice!—on Ekstasis, where it sits well among that album's more conventional songs, but is not quite as perfectly framed as on Tragedy. In a sense, "Goddess Eyes" is Holter doing her best Kate Bush, next to the album's broader Laurie Anderson brushstrokes.

After "Goddess Eyes," Tragedy dives headlong into texture and mood pieces, offering no respite from Holter's artiness, but widening her instrumental palette. "Celebration" adds what sounds like harp (harpsichord?) and some of the most heavenly piano textures I've ever heard, folded into a 12-minute song that remains as much ambience as songcraft. "So Lillies" sees Holter twisting her vocals into loops and layers over a bed of field samples (birdsong, running water, and sampled speech) before a gentle techno pulse and harpsichord take over. "Finale" begins with rich pipe-organ chords before Holter builds up a massive chorus of looped, angelic vocals bit by bit, like an aural Tower of Babel stretching ever heavenward. It's a beautiful ending to a difficult album, incorporating melody and texture through familiar instruments like piano, saxophone, and Holter's fluttering voice.

Music this meticulously crafted and planned out, backed by a concept based around a Greek drama, is tailor-made for listeners to draw lines in the sand. In a behind-the-scenes discussion between Brainwashed writers, one person commented that Tragedy offers "enough seemingly deranged and self-sabotaging artistic decisions to keep [him] entertained." Another disagreed: "No one thinks Holter sounds suspiciously like Enya? A lot of music tows the New Age line but Holter is ridiculous. She should just cover "Sail Away" and be done with it." Either way, given the LP pressing's initial scarcity, I'm willing to bet that Tragedy was talked about more than listened to in 2011. Given its new CD pressing, it deserves listening from the broader audience now discovering her music—love it or hate it.

Samples:

• Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art
• Goddess Eyes
• Finale

15 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Curiously, Jon Porras' second solo album does not sound anything at all like 2011's brilliant and blackened Undercurrent.  Instead, it sounds exactly like Barn Owl.  More specifically, it sounds like the chameleonic duo's lonely, vaguely occult-sounding desert rock side.  On one hand, that is pretty disappointing, as his debut was more immediate and powerful. Also, sounding like his primary band seems to defeat the whole purpose of releasing solo work.  On the other hand, Black Mesa is an excellent album in its own right (and is much better than several actual Barn Owl releases).

Thrill Jockey

Although the slow-motion, sparse, twang- and delay-heavy instrumentals assembled will sound quite familiar to anyone who has heard Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, there is no denying that Porras has that particular niche locked down.  While he has veered into many strains of drone and avant metal over the course of his career, it is Morricone-inspired Americana that is most distinctively and uniquely his.  Obviously, Morricone's "Spaghetti Western" soundtrack work has been borrowed, referenced, and homaged to death over the years, but Porras has detoured that inspiration into a narcotic, nightmarish vision all his own.  All the tropes are certainly here, yet in Jon's hands they sound bleak, forlorn, and subtly turbulent.  Songs like "Into Midnight" don't sound even remotely swaggering or heroic–they sound like a broken Clint Eastwood turning his back on humanity and riding his horse off into the desert night to die alone.  Or summon a demon or apocalyptic rain of fire or something.

Aside from the roiling drone of Black Mesa's finale ("Beyond the Veil"), these seven songs stay pretty firmly anchored in similar (and willfully narrow) aesthetic territory: slow-moving and clean minor-key arpeggios, minimal percussion, strong and simple melodies, and a lysergic haze of e-bow shimmer.  There are some subtle variations, like the comparatively anthemic stretch of strummed chords and distorted lead guitar in "Candlelight Mirage," but the divergences all make sense within the overall dynamic arc of the album.  It is obvious that Jon set out to make something coherent and large-scale rather than just a batch of new songs.

One of my main critiques of Barn Owl has always been that some of their albums have felt very fractured and kaleidoscopic and one of my others is that Evan Caminiti and Porras often fail to give their better ideas enough time to organically unfold in order to reach their full potential.  Porras, to his credit, deftly avoids both of those historic pitfalls this time around: Black Mesa flows, breathes, and intelligently builds tension with a strong sense of purpose and clarity.  Jon doesn't make a single wrong move or play a single unnecessary note.  Obviously, such a sustained mood will probably be a bit exhausting for fans that are not particularly enthusiastic about a cinematic jangling and twanging epic of this nature (I prefer Porras' more drone-based work myself, for example), but he has rarely sounded this focused, ambitious, or masterfully edited.  This is a beautifully sequenced and evocative song suite (and a significant creative breakthough besides).

Samples:

• Blue Crescent Vision
• Candlelight Mirage
• Beyond the Veil

 

15 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

There's a saying something to the effect of "You'll never be as good as your first album," and for Frank Tovey, his second Fad Gadget record doesn't make a good argument against that statement. In 1981, Tovey seems to have been trying to distance himself from the electro domination that prevailed throughout his first singles and much of Fireside Favourites. Depeche Mode were graduating from opening for Fad Gadget to headlining their own shows, and Mute was being recognized as a home to many synth-dominated acts. Tovey made choices that may have suited him right at the time but years later I don't think they hold up so well.

Mute

It's important to note that between Fireside Favourites and Incontinent came a single for "Make Room." It featured live drumming from Wire's (then ex-) drummer, Robert Gotobed, Wire friend Desmond Simmons on synth, and a slapping funk bass riff contributed by Pete Balmer. The song leaned more in the direction of electro-funk than that of synth-punk, and didn't leave nearly as much an impression on the fans, critics, and history as the B-side, the seminal "Lady Shave." "Lady Shave" was clearly the more bold side. It more closely resembled the early Fad singles, but, regardless of the instrumentation, the song was an attack: it was aggressive, dirty, catchy, and unavoidable. I mention the importance of this song as it seems like such a poor choice to relinquish such an awesome feat to the B-side. To me, this is the choice that sets Incontinent up for mediocrity.

One of the most unfortunate perils of British music is that the fickle press seems to have had an unfair influence on decisions of bands and record labels. Just as soon as acts like OMD, Human League, Gary Numan, or Soft Cell were "in" for being synth acts, they were "out," and most were changing their sound in the early '80s to either prove that they could create music by (needlessly) adding excessive amounts of more traditional rock instruments or cave in to record executives who wanted them to "update" their sound to a more commercially viable "pop." (This is a repeating cycle, see: the demise of shoegaze in the early '90s.)

"Blind Eyes" doesn't launch the album with a very bold statement. The funky bass, piano, hand claps, and live drums, are all mixed so homogenously dead center, and Tovey's vocals blend in so much with the colorless tapestry that they too sound almost completely void of personality.It certainly doesn't sound representative of the Fad Gadget who was introduced to the world, launching himself off bars and engaging everyone. Even the song "Swallow It," which is a fantastic song on paper (it's got a great riff and audacious lyrics), sounds rather flat.

"Saturday Night Special" is pure genius, however, it sounds unlike anything Tovey did before or after. The song, a waltz with harpsichord providing the bulk of the instrumentation, either gets its name from the common slang for a small, cheap handgun, or perhaps it is a nod to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song with the same title. It features some of the most memorable lyrics ever penned by Tovey and is this album's jab at America:

"Every man should have the right to own a gun
Every man should have the right to shoot someone.
Film stars and farmers still forcing opinions like TV politicians playing cowboys and indians."

Despite the setback of having a somewhat flat production like the other songs, "Saturday Night Special" manages to be a breakthrough, as is the closer for side one of the LP, the instrumental title track. This electro gem features some delicious sequencing by Daniel Miller and probably would have made a great B-side to "Lady Shave," which should have not only been an A-side, but was damn good enough to make Incontinent a better record as side one song one. "Manual Dexterity," the instrumental song opening the record's side two, on the other hand, is forgettable enough to have been left as a B-side and off the album.

"King of the Flies," got a remix before being featured on a 7", making it more immediate and less bland, however it didn't make the song any less forgettable. "Diminished Responsibility," on the other hand, screams to be a full-album side, as the nearly six minute piece with drone waves and noises could easily last for another 15 minutes. The album's closer, "Plain Clothes," is almost unlistenable due to the painfully uncomfortably distorted guitar riffing.

Sure, Frank, too wanted to prove that he could record an album loaded with more traditional instrumentation, but it wasn't what he was good at, not at this point. What followed the next year, Under the Flag, thankfully more than made up for the poor decision making that went into Incontinent.

samples:

• Saturday Night Special
• Incontinent
• Diminished Responsibility