Good old Residents, what with their big eyeball heads and anonymity disturbing the peace of minds everywhere. Over the course of 25 years, folks have learned to beware their eccentricities, as all the while their many heirs sprawl about like prodigal idiot savants. We don't need to fear this gruesome family: Nurse with Wound, Coil, Biota, Current 93-- one and all can make messes to their hearts' content as wholesome rock 'n' roll innocents need merely to shift eyes over the rows of these bands' records in shops. Because no matter what unbalanced commotion these groups enact, very little makes its way into the heartland of our great nation, right? Deviant collage and Dadaism may wreak havoc on the marginal audience attuned to its effects, but they are nonetheless marginal.
Or are they? Mr. Michael Patton runs a fairly successful indie label featuring bands that perform along the hallowed parameters of The Residents and NWW (and his own A-list bizarro unit Mr. Bungle), and his roster receives considerable coverage in our corners (yep, check today's review of Kaada's Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time). Elsewhere, labels such as Ata Tak and Beta-Lactam Ring prove that no matter how far out you get, there's always room to stretch. So, let's be serious: Avant-garde rock is not tucked away in the corner of Chicago art schools, nor is it merely the refuge of nocturnal drug experimentalists with a penchant for art-damage and enough eBay money to pay for their Pro-Tools. It has, in fact, long since crept into seemingly normal neighborhoods. The duo Samus, for example, are from Eastern, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Gallagher and John Busher aim to please, or scare, or possibly just tickle each other with their debut, Desengano. With minimal assistance, in the span of just over 70 minutes, they manage to deconstruct as much of the workaday sludge metal and tape-splicing gumbo as you'd expect for any band of self-dubbed "oddballs." And with that description, they tread the well-worn path of understatement and anonymity so revered by Resident-ial family of noisemakers. I'm no traditionalist, but I can admire the strength of musical lineage, especially when it's so ostensibly undernourished. It's too bad Samus sound so much like Disco Volante-era Bungle.
Of course, there's no crime in sounding similar to other bands, but as all of the bands I referenced above can take considerable pride in sounding almost nothing like each other, Samus', well... sameness does strip Desengano of some much-needed edge. "DJ Delta Burke" goes through quite a backlog of late-night cable television blaxploitation movies and educational program sound-bites as narrative for its Casio-powered rhythm box beats and boogie-woogie piano samples. It's interesting when the textures change in rapid succession, but over the course of ten minutes, the gag wears thin. Similarly, "The Happy Sultan" wears its Melvins metal-dirge and Patton-ted screaming maniac vocals badges slightly too frequently to qualify as tribute. I'll add that the production is great, in a lo-fi, stoned-out kind of way.
Predictably, the best moments happen when Samus ventures away from realms already extensively mined by their elders, as on the outstanding version of Duke Ellington's "Caravan" (here titled "Super-Orthepedic [sic] Caravan"). They use a 50s Hollywood orchestra sample saturated with disembodied soprano goodness as the intro to a cheap synth-and-cocktail lounge groove fit for the finest kings of space-age poppy-delia. Furthermore, they pull out the psycho-sludge riffs at the end, and rather than numb my brain into submission, actually inject a little muscle into the mix. Nice stuff, and what's more, they accomplish it in less than half the time of most of the other tunes on the disc. I wouldn't say brevity is a prerequisite for serving up a particularly potent slice of abnormality, but in Samus' case, distilling the experience helps them to break free from the pack.
