As collaborations go, Icy Demons are not exactly unprecedented. Featuring Need New Body drummer Pow Pow (née Chris Powell) and Bablicon bassist Griffin Rodriquez (known here as Blue Hawaii), as well as three Chicago musicians sporting their own clever nicknames, Icy Demons' Fight Back! is really more the consummation of an old friendship than a new deal. Bablicon featured heavily on Need New Body's 2001 debut, and there was always bound to be a serviceable halfway point between the bands' respective freeform melting pot and frenetic exertion. Which is all good background, to be sure, but what I really want to know is, if the demons are icy, has Hell frozen over? Because they all look kind of chilly on the album cover (which, incidentally, folds out into an awesome six-panel icy demon family portrait on the reverse of the liners).
The album art is weirdly apropos for the music contained within-- the hodgepodge of funky little demons in all kinds of strange colors looks a lot like how the band sounds. Their music is dense, weird and full of strangely hued interludes. It's tempting to call the music a grab bag of styles, but the twist is that these guys are combining styles that never really had names to being with.
The odd falsetto vocal melodies that Powell whips up usually spring from an instrumental line buried somewhere in the music, often on a cello or one of Dave "Thousand Rabbits Running" McDonnell's many reed instruments. On "Manny's", his melody is indirectly doubled by guitarists Matt "Young Master" Schneider and Dave "Moylando Calrissian" Moyland-- but rather than simply duplicate his vocal line, each guitarist weaves his own slightly dissonant line beneath that roughly follows the same arc, giving the verse an odd Beefheartian flavor. The song later takes off into a prolonged instrumental fantasia led by McDonald's clarinet and Powell's jazz-inflected drumming.
Rodriquez's history as an Elephant 6 cohort and the band's standing on Circulatory System's Cloud Recordings label seems all the more logical as you read through the extensive list of guest musicians, who are credited with everything from simple trombone and backing vocals to "spirit wind." The free-wheeling structure that trademarks Bablicon's labyrinthine albums is also the guiding principle here, as songs veer into passages of psychedelic bop and florid music box electronica, with subbass beats supplanted by clicking percussion and spoons.
"Desert Toll/Spirit Guide" is a Fender Rhodes-led dive into Miles Davis' fusion period via Islands-era King Crimson, while the vocal tracks brim with Zappa weirdness and multi-tiered arrangements that suggest Mingus had he given up jazz for Krautrock in his final days. "Bitter Moon", meanwhile, is almost a straight pastiche of Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 circa Equinox, with guitar figures that might fit on a Jobim record-- if Robert Fripp was Jobim's guitarist. "Simian Warlords" leads Boards of Canada into inhospitable lo-fi territory, while "The Silent Hero" opens with Spanish piano and settles into a dub groove coated in shivering guitar interjections and kalimba. Which is all to say that Icy Demons don't really sound entirely like anything else.
There are apt comparisons to be found within individual songs, but as a whole, Fight Back! is one hell of a unique concoction, like a prog-fusion orchestron gone completely nuts. As such, it's also unfortunately given to a few long passages (a couple lasting more than one track) of exhausting pasta preparation-- I wish I could say having passages that remind me of the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra and Mancini spy scores was enough to make for a killer record, but it's really not. That said, most of the material is very strong, and the album is frontloaded with several sublime snatches of out-and-out strangeness. It's not going to cause any major climatic shifts south of Heaven, but it's should please a lot of people in search of their next fix of almost indescribably odd indie rock.
