We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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I have always been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr overflow with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. Mascis' first studio album under his own name, Several Shades of Why, is a primarily acoustic effort and, unfortunately, a forgettable listen. In a refreshing twist, Kurt Vile, who takes inspiration from Mascis and will be opening his US tour this spring, outshines him on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date), Smoke Ring for My Halo.
This surreal and wildly ambitious project began quite humbly in 1988 when Greif found an old three-LP audio book of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland at a thrift store and began idly warping and enhancing it.  Sometime afterward, he submitted an unrelated cassette to Staalplaat with some of those experiments on the back side and they offered to release the Alice material instead of the intended work. Originally released only as a series of five limited-edition albums in the early '90s, this sprawling epic quickly became Greif's most well-known and enduring work.  Appropriately, it has now been reissued as a rather striking box set for the second time.
Randy Grief began making music in the 1970s, but he first came into relative prominence with the launch of his Swinging Axe Productions label in 1983, which released early works by Controlled Bleeding and Merzbow.  That early stint in America's very lonely noise cassette underground left a lasting impression on his aesthetic over the years, despite the fact that he soon began finding inspiration in literature, exotic field recordings, and musique concrète.  As a result, the stylistic stew here is a very eclectic one, blending radio serials, tape loop cut-ups, avant garde classical cacophony, clanking early industrial textures, horror movie soundtracks, and brooding ambient over the course of six mind-bending hours (and not especially seamlessly). Despite that clumsiness (and, of course, the technological limitations inherent in making computer-based music two decades ago), Alice in Wonderland is a spectacular achievement.
Greif faced a number of unusual hurdles with this project.  The first, naturally, is the sheer scope of the material: not many musicians have the imagination, attention-span, and patience necessary to make a coherent six-hour-long soundscape with very little reliance on repetition.  In fact, Randy himself has stated that the project probably never would have been finished if he hadn't committed to it in advance (the whole thing took him 5 years to finish).  The second difficulty is that Greif found the tone of the narration to be too even for his liking, so he needed to force some dynamism into it without sacrificing intelligibility, flow, and coherence.  The third (and most substantial) problem is that Carroll's story was already perfectly fine without some experimental musician from LA messing around with it.  Improving upon something that is already complete (and a literary classic besides) is no simple feat: Greif had to find a way to add music without detracting or distracting from the text while also avoiding the peril of being utterly eclipsed by it.  The route that Randy wisely chose was to texturally highlight and emphasize the darker side that was already there.
While it is very easy to pick out some rather dated textures, bombastic moments, or bloated individual pieces over the five CDs, the whole is often quite successful. Greif exercises a great deal of tact, largely allowing the narration to continue unmolested and seldom plunging into lengthy instrumental stretches.  That linearly unfolding thread prevents the album from ever losing much momentum or being derailed by much in the way of self-indulgence.  Also, that same stream of words provides much grist for Grief's accompaniment: most of the creative heavy lifting on the album involves the skillful and aggressive manipulation of the actors' voices, surrounding the narration with disjointed phonemes, pitch-shifting, panning, backwards voices, and sundry other neat tricks.  On the rare occasions when Randy does attack the actual narrative flow, he generally does it to supremely hallucinatory effect, making Alice and her friends sound submerged, fragmented, or narcotically slowed-down when it suits the story.
As for the music underneath it all, Greif is all over the place.  The shimmering and droning ambient passages still sound fairly contemporary today, but some of the harsher or more rhythmic pieces can be a bit jarring or too rooted in late '80s industrial/noise music for my liking: plodding drum machines with lots of reverb, very artificial-sounding synthesizers, etc.  However, it all perversely works somehow, as the resulting dissonance and disorientation serve the themes of the story quite well. Also, Greif definitely succeeded in giving the story a compelling dynamic arc, as his clanging rhythms and garish sound colors bring a great deal of animation and tension to the more action-packed parts of the tale, which in turn heightens the impact of the woozier, more drugged-sounding passages.
Before hearing this album, I had never thought that the story of Alice in Wonderland held much interest for me as an adult.  However, Greif has done a truly remarkable job in emphasizing its more unsettling, creepy, and Kafkaesque elements in a thoroughly compelling and imaginative way.  Despite its occasional missteps and some ravaging from time, the cumulative power of this album is massive.  In fact, it is difficult to imagine experiencing Alice in installments over the course of several years as its original listeners did–a boxed set is the only logical format for this release.  Or course, six solid of hours of mechanized psychedelia is certainly exhausting, but so is spending a week in a foreign county: total immersion seems like the only way to fully experience a work this singular and consuming Many people have called this album a classic over the years and I don't disagree, but this is something more than a great album: this is a complete, self-enclosed sound world.
As much as I enjoyed Pedestrian Deposit's first "post-noise" effort (2009's Austere), I didn't think it was nearly on the same level as what Jon Borges and Shannon Kennedy were capable of delivering live.  That disparity has now been conclusively remedied, as this expanded reissue of a 2010 Housecraft cassette captures the duo at their mesmerizing, crackling, and eerie peak.
Pedestrian Deposit's evolution since Kennedy's arrival has been quite a rapid and dramatic one, which is no surprise: adding a second person to a former one-man operation is bound to have a big impact.  Particularly if that one man is best-known as a harsh noise artist and the new member is a cellist.  Remarkably, however, there did not seem to be any period of awkwardness or growing pain, as Austere debuted the more restrained Pedestrian Deposit sound beautifully.
Still, it was already a snapshot of very different band by the time it was released, as Jon and Shannon's progression has been much faster than their recorded work can keep up with.  It is hard to articulate exactly what has changed since the recording of that album and these four songs (recorded between 2009 and 2010), but it seems like PD have grown a bit more adept at exploiting the full potential of Shannon's cello work.  For instance, there is actually a melancholy plucked melody at the beginning of "A Blessing."  Such excursions are the exception rather than the rule though: East Fork/North Fork is still very much a hazy, drone-centric, and forlorn-sounding album. Nevertheless, a bit more warmth and color have definitely crept into the picture this time around.  Not much, of course, but enough to imbue the music with a little more character and humanity than I expected.  It makes a big difference, as the fleeting glimpses of life make the surrounding haunted, creaking emptiness seem significantly more affecting and unsettling.
Of course, a lot of the album's success is also due to the fact that Borges keeps getting better and more assured with each passing year.  While there is one welcome and well-timed blast of stuttering static in "Strife/Meridian" that reminds me of Pedestrian Deposit's more violent past, Jon has made the transition from explosive noise artist to architect of slow-burning ominousness seem effortless.  Throughout these four pieces, slow-moving bowed tones actively quiver, swell, and dissipate amidst often little more than a bed of hiss or low-hum.  This is a lot of open space here, which makes the cello sound especially lonely and endangered.  Also, I was especially struck by the attention to textural detail throughout the album, such as the low rhythmic swells, hums, crunches, and scrapes that call to mind distant machinery.  There is a definite sense of place, even if it is a rather foreboding one.  That dark atmosphere is further deepened by the fact that these pieces are not at all prone to repetition or stasis–they gradually unfold, which means that something always seems to be on the verge of happening.  
East Fork/North Fork makes me feel like I am alone in the ruins of a deserted town…or perhaps not alone (in a bad way).  It is never quite clear whether the pervading mood is desolation or quiet dread, which is the kind of tense ambiguity I like.  This might be the best album that Jon Borges has released yet.
Two musicians are jointly credited for this album: Jamie Smith, the sound sculptor behind 2009's buzz band du jour, the xx, and Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary spoken word poet and musician who should require no introduction. This project, a full-length collection of remixes that draws primarily from Scott-Heron's first recording in eons, 2010's triumphant I'm New Here, has been touted as a collaborative effort. A cursory listen, however, makes one thing immediately clear—this is Jamie's show.
I had doubts as to whether We're New Here could stand on its own, given Jamie's limited resume. He contributed a great deal to the xx's debut two years ago—perfect, minimal pop that seemed fully formed from the start, nuanced and emotionally vulnerable. My question, however, was whether the xx were a one-trick pony, in possession of a sound so singular that it lacked a means of expansion. We're New Here is an emphatic rebuttal, showing Jamie in full command of a range of sounds—and while that bodes well for the xx and their longevity, this album demands to be heard in the meantime.
Throughout We're New Here, Jamie weaves Scott-Heron's weathered vocals from I'm New Here into his low-key, introspective world of UK dub, garage, dance and electronic music. Scott-Heron is gleefully chopped up, looped, rearranged and scattered around in order to supplement Jamie's soundscapes—vocals are placed carefully to suit the music, never the inverse. Jamie doesn't limit his samples to source material on I'm New Here, either—he digs deep, going back to Scott-Heron's classic 1970s work as well as samples of Baby Washington and Gloria Gaynor's enduring "Casanova Brown," among others.
I'm New Here was a hazy, succinct suite of interconnected songs and sketches—some serving as focal points, others as brief transitional pieces reliant on context. It was disjointed and rough, a harrowing listen, its gritty sounds reflecting the words of a broken man. Jamie's cut-and-paste job on We're New Here is a smart recontextualization of its source material: if I'm New Here was a jigsaw of sorts, this album strips away the dark vibes and reassembles the pieces into a more youthful, celebratory musical palette.
It is commendable that We're New Here plays not as its own important work of art, but as a humble love letter to Scott-Heron's legacy and influence. The bulk of Scott-Heron's recorded work is essential listening, and this album comes across as a respectful tribute to a legend, not a quick cash-in or an attempt to raise Jamie's profile in between albums from the xx. (Note the top billing given to Scott-Heron on—let's be honest—someone else's album.) Fortunately, aside from paying its respects, We're New Here is an impressive musical statement in its own right, a presentation of Jamie's heretofore-unseen breadth as a musician and producer.
We're New Here is a joy to listen to—a playful, diverse album with character (and bass) to spare. By combining Gil Scott-Heron's ageless vocals with his own late-night dreamscapes rooted in UK garage and dub, Jamie Smith has crafted a strong, singular collection of music that succeeds as a nod to Scott-Heron's genius—and, perhaps more importantly, a display of Jamie's budding talent.
This is probably one of the most nauseating, disgusting sounding recordings I own, which isn't a surprise given the artists involved. It has a sound that drips with blood, saliva and phlegm and is more than a visceral experience from both of these two modern aktionists.
Consisting of live recordings from 2005 (a single performance from Phillips, three separate ones by Yeldham), both sides of this LP are immaculately presented sonically, with the sparse artwork and virgin white vinyl belying the disgusting mess hidden within the grooves.
Australia's favorite son and dualpLOVER head Justice Yeldham contributes three different shorter performances combined into a single side-long track called "Keep Daddy Safe" that captures sonically what his instrument looks like visually.His instrument is a contact mic’d piece of glass that he covers in KY Jelly and rubs his face on, violently, and blood often ends up an additional part of the mix.
The wet, sloppy undulating noise that comes forth is drenched in overdrive and metallic echoes, occasionally blasting out into almost synth-like textures.The second performance has a more cavernous, hollow sound with flatulent, guttural noises and spacey, sonorous outputs of tone, all thrown together in a sloppy mess.The combination of liquid gushes and distorted buzzes sounds like someone pissing on the third rail, before the performance obviously ends with glass shattering and applause.
Phillips, who is part of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective that also includes Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock) and Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant), has his own brand of absurdist influenced performance art that is the clear descendant of the Viennese Aktionists, with the "Breaking Tests" of Gunter Brus seemingly as a starting point.
Phillips' performance, "Freedom Isn't Free" begins simple enough, with deep, carefully measured breathing that is barely louder than the crowd noise, paired with a slow electric pulse.Eventually the sound of his heartbeat becomes louder and faster, with the breathing transitioning into hyperventilation.
Any semblance of "normal" behavior is tossed out when his vocalisms twist into dog-like freakouts, choking, gagging, and pained screams, all of which are layered and looped together.Eventually the pieces come together into a heavy wall of noise, layers of squelches and occasional breaks to tense, unpleasant ambience punctuated by labored breathing that comes to a sudden, abrupt end that could almost have been Phillips losing consciousness, given the physical intensity of his performance.
There is this overall feeling of viscera and filth all over the album that makes it undeniably unpleasant, but like a messy car accident, it just makes it all the more attractive.This is two great sides of noise, but not anything pleasant to hear after a big meal.
There's a strong pairing on this album, with Whitman's modular electronic improvisations on one side being balanced out nicely by Shiflet's more spacious, droning textures on the other. There is also a sense of commonality to be heard, which unifies the two sides of this LP, making it feel more like a collaboration and less like a split release.
Whitman's half, "070325" opens with sparse, deep reverberating tones that slowly get heavier and build in complexity, with any sort of pensive discipline upset by modular synth chirps and echoing pauses.Sawtooth waves are shaped into horror movie scrapes and erratic stop/start blasts that keep a sense of discomfort strong.
With the unpredictable sputtering noises, the piece starts to feel like it encroaches on free jazz territory, with square waves and low frequency oscillators mimicking horns and woodwinds.At times what could pass for a didgeridoo appears with a low, almost rhythmic throb, but is frequently interrupted by synth outbursts that could be emanating for a mad scientist’s lair, all dynamic and drawn out until the performance ends with a loping engine idle.
On the flip of this heavy slab of vinyl, Mike Shiflet uses less identifiable tools in his performance of "080409," conjuring up an accordion-like drone that is simple on the surface, but is a microcosm of sound below.The structure changes slowly, but noticeably, so it never becomes too frozen, nor does it jump around harshly.Amid the expansive waves of sound and sputtering, erratic noises there are subtle hints of music buried, but never allowed to be fully heard.
Eventually the mix opens up, reigning in the bulk of the sound to leave subtle, warm tones in a spacious piece of tonal bliss.The peace is short lived, when a low buzzing swarm and what sounds like bass strings rattling appear, pushing the track into more creaky and scary territory.It all builds to a crescendo where I think I heard some actual guitar playing in there somewhere before coming to a swift end.
I enjoy the juxtaposition of the two sides, with Whitman's crazed analog outbursts nicely mediated by Shiflet's more pensive, expansive walls of noise.The two sides almost bleed into each other though, as both artists use elements of the other’s style, and it always fits in quite well.While many split releases sound like each artist simply doing their own thing, here there seems some sort of unspoken, psychic unity between the two that leads to a stronger whole.
The first new full-length in five years from these drifters could not have been christened any more appropriately. Over three quarters of an hour Windy and Carl build dreams. Isolating all the emptiness and distance sometimes found in the mind and soul, they soothe everything away in a blur of tones that would make the local cathedral sound positively heavenly.
As soon as "The Eternal Struggle" begins it is clear that that the duo is addressing the demons that get a chance to express themselves in the middle of the night, at the most frightening moments of human exposure and vulnerability. But, instead of being a dark album, every moment of this album is akin to being elevated out of a nightmare and into the warm and welcoming hands of the daytime. The wavering hum that begins the album is the last moment of fear and the first moment of some understanding, the feeling of calm and relaxation that hits as soon as the adrenaline pumps itself out and allows the muscles to relax.
All the force and energy associated with pain is redirected, breathing slows, ideas slowly begin to form, and the self is recaptured, allowed some room to move about instead of being controlled by elementary fear and alertness. More and more tones pile on top of still more tones until an impossible slide of sound has been solidified.
For just a brief moment it's obvious what Windy and Carl up to, but before it can be grasped, they move on, emphasizing the idea of infinite, incomplete, and satisfying composition. The only sure thing on this record is change. At times a heavily subdued and relegated bass line seems to pump away in the background, like the pulse of the heart or the tick of a clock, but it's only there momentarily, completely submerged beneath the hovering choir that permeates the entire album, like the light of the moon shifting on water. It's haunting, at times its removes me from the room and traps me, the very essence of the dark surrounding my head.
There is a depressing lean to the music, but the beauty it exudes stands above whatever desolation comes with the passing of dreams.
The second disc is another chance for everyone to hear Dedications to Flea, an EP released on Brainwashed and dedicated to the duo's dog, Flea. The liner notes detail the life and death of this pup and, as corny as this may be, is actually a bit heart-wrenching. I guess it all depends on how much of an animal lover one is. The use of sound from their walks with Flea only adds to the weight of the album and it is a fine compliment (as different as it is from The Dream House) to an already excellent album. Some drone groups seem to carry with them an emptiness that no amount of arrangement could fix, but The Dream House seems full, brimming over with a misty breath that is fulfilling, brilliant, and sometimes sad.
Listening to the album from start to finish is a wonderful experience, sounding more human and adventurous than any other album this year.
There's something about the music of Thighpaulsandra that is quintessentially British sounding, but this compositional four-track spurt from the Welsh Valleys doesn't rely on stirringly pompous anthems or traditional folk instrumentation to do it.
There’s an audible grandness of sound to Chamber Music that evokes some kind of depraved royalty, and when combined with the sinister darker side to this amiable bright collaborator of the stars, there lies the unique futurepast hybrid of Thighpaulsandra’s sound.
Stepping away from the improv of Rape Scene (but keeping the theme of two-faced album titles) hasn’t altered his musical world all that much and there are strong similarities to that release here despite the songs here having been written and rehearsed; his own description of the album as ‘four men in a room playing’ defies its odd nature. There are many things I’d expect three men to get up to in a room with Thighpaulsandra, and this LP isn’t one of them.
The four intrepid players begin at the edge of Quatermass’s pit for the seven-minute mental health ride of “Cast in Dead Homes.” It’s a typical Thighpaulsandra composition in that you never know what’s the around the next audio corner as he explores imaginary landscapes with a reliable palette of après-prog instrumentation. Like an unravelling Hammer Horror theme there’s always an element of restraint in the song’s theatrical lurching xylophone and ribcage played melody that extends across the whole LP.
The spectre of Tangerine Dream lurks on both “A Blizzard of Altars” and “Bleeding Text for the Cripplethrush,” whose analogue based sounds are slowly filtered through personalized hybrid processors and begin to betray their origins turning up as warped digital conundrums. The erratic swarm of ingredients continues on and ends up including a brief Eastern European/Edgar Allen Poe-style soliloquy alongside a theremin and the sound of fox hunt horns. It even has the temerity to unashamedly end with a section of conservative organ/rock guitar soloing in the finest spirit of prog.
Further highlighting his ability to handle a tune and his empathy with space music “The Unwilling Wardens of Ice” takes the long route of fourteen and a half minutes to lay down some eerie and indistinct curved notes. As expected he ends the song and the album in relative crashing chaos despite taking several almost symphonic whale song-style turns. Judging by his recent release schedule I’ll bet on him confounding expectations again on another release before the year is out.
Atjust under eleven and a half minutes long this four-track releasecovers an area of musical no man’s land with both abandon andreflection in equal amounts. Where Guessmen’s musical soundclashinstantly aurally succeeds while others flounder through musicalpatchworks is the fact that the messy bang and stutter sounds soanimated and exciting.
There’s realskill and attention to detail in making the constantly scatteringparticles of “Average Fish”s glitchy stomping analogueness sound likethe anthem of the most coherent drunk man to ever threaten a yard ofale. With more than enough remarkable debris in the background tothoroughly mangle a less solid tune there’s a coherent electronicjunkyard aesthetic to much of the band’s repertoire that’s occasionallysoftened by more conventional but refreshing instrumentation like theclarinet.
Even though they ablyprove that they bang like the highest heeled unshaven Warp signed glamband ever they’re wise enough to also advertise their more thoughtfulside. The sequencing of the melancholic alcohol tinged regret-filledcloser “Human Being Kind” brings the band a more mature perspectiveleaving the EP with the tinkling of the milkman’s delivery on the‘morning after’. Its softer electronic musical droplets (tears?) andrain on grass FX give a sensible flipside to the megaphone barked freakshow tales and after “Troglodyte”s asthmatic skank has battered thebrain with its tree trunk arms it’s a welcome relief.
Every time Mogwai release a new album, there is a line of thought that repeats itself among fans yearning for the band's past glories: "Hmm... another reliably average and/or boring Mogwai album... it's no Young Team." Well, I suggest we consider that streak broken—because, 15 years and seven studio albums into their career, Mogwai have recorded and released their very best work...
... and buried it on the bonus CD included with the deluxe version of Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will—another reliably average and/or boring Mogwai album.
First things first: I am blown away each time I listen to "Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)," a long-form composition created to soundtrack an art installation by Douglas Gordon and Olof Nicolai. This restrained, elegant and evocative mini-masterpiece is, frankly, Mogwai's best recorded work. Featuring a three-piece string section (violin, viola, cello) along with piano, gentle chimes, and background tape hiss, "Music for a Forgotten Future" unfolds patiently for 15 minutes, an elegiac music-box lullaby with ominous undertones. Guitars eventually join, building to a brief and well-earned crescendo, followed by a beautiful coda on strings alone. Length aside, this is a much different beast than "Mogwai Fear Satan" or "My Father My King"—trading in muscle for minutiae, "Music for a Forgotten Future" is the work of a veteran band playing to strengths that barely existed in its work until now. This is essential listening—the sample below doesn't begin to do it justice.
Unfortunately, nothing on the proper, patchy album holds a candle to "Music for a Forgotten Future." Mogwai are at their most tedious as a full-on rock band—their tempos drag, sacrificed for the sake of heaviness, and all sense of forward motion in their music disappears. The first song Sub Pop released from Hardcore Will Never Die left me indifferent: "Rano Pano" finds Mogwai straining to capture the sense of churning, psychedelic heaviness perfected by past tourmates Bardo Pond, but coming up empty-handed. The riff at the song's core sounds fine for a few bars, but fails to evolve like Bardo's druggy, kaleidoscopic psych-rock, becoming a chore to endure for five minutes.
To be fair, "Rano Pano" is a contender for the worst song on Hardcore Will Never Die, which is, overall, a notable improvement on Mogwai's dreadful last album, The Hawk Is Howling. One quick-fix addition is the motorik beat that anchors several of these song, allowing the songs to breathe instead of plod. Granted, Mogwai's version of motorik at times sounds studied, unnatural, like it was Xeroxed straight from a Krautrock 101 handbook. Songs like "Mexican Grand Prix," while a breath of fresh air on Hardcore Will Never Die, also make me want to pull out my Neu! and La Düsseldorf records to experience Klaus Dinger's brilliance firsthand—not a tribute to the source material. There are also songs like "San Pedro," which apply the motorik drum pattern in a more forceful, rock-based setting that I find somewhat engaging, but not a strong case for the album overall.
The best song on Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will doesn't draw from Krautrock, though, and isn't rock-based at all. If anything, I would consider "Letters to the Metro" the baby brother of "Music for a Forgotten Future," a successful translation of that piece's atmospheric beauty into a snapshot one-fifth its length. A simple piano melody anchors "Letters to the Metro," accompanied by strings and an achingly pretty slide guitar in the chorus—subtle, effective embellishment. The enjoyable moments on Hardcore Will Never Die are a reminder that Mogwai's best days are not behind them, but that their key to success is no longer rooted in soft-loud gimmicks and overcooked riffs, but the gorgeous, infinitely compelling ambience of "Music for a Forgotten Future" and its kin.
This limited run of rather expensive 7" singles by Steven Stapleton and Andrew Liles are a bit of a mixed bag. It is not Nurse With Wound’s finest hour but it will keep die-hard fans going until the guys get around to another full album. However, for the casual fan this is probably best avoided as the high price and variable quality of the music will most likely leave a sour taste in the mouth.
The sleaze funk of "Sarah’s Beloved Aunt" at first sounds too cheesy and cringe-worthy to enjoy and the porno spoken word vocals also push the boundaries of good taste. However, with repeated exposure it all comes together in the same way as Nurse With Wound's lounge exotica album Huffin' Rag Blues did. The screaming guitars and unpredictable edits and manipulations of the source materials bring this from embarrassing porn pastiche to a celebration of wah guitars and smutty talk.
On the other hand and on the other side, "Bum Brush Effect" feels like a bit of a throwaway inclusion. Layers of meandering noodling on various instruments test my patience and despite trying to get into it, I am just not seeing eye to eye with Stapleton and Liles on this. The best part is unfortunately the brief outro that seems to be the kind of '70s sitcom/elevator music that, although awful, is oddly compelling.
One final note regarding the format, I had balked at the price of Rushkoff Coercion but buckled and went for the picture disc version despite my misgivings about its sound quality. Surprisingly, the usual extra surface noise associated with picture discs is completely absent and while I cannot say that the full cost to my wallet was justified, I can at least see that the overall production quality is high. The poster sleeve and picture disc match the music well; a collage of used porn, retro abstract graphics and DNA.