The scene, improbably enough, is an all-night Laundromat. Inside, a sinewy, mustachioed fellow is tinkering with one of the machines. His shirt reads "Mitch." Not far down a bank of dryers, Randii and Tanya are sporting with one another's silks and satins while their respective loads lumber toward conclusion. Tanya tosses a pair of her unwashed intimates in Randii's face, which Tanya proceeds to sniff-- thus foreshadowing the hot girl-on-girl action to come. By now, Mitch is supervising the panty fight. He interrupts with something about how sensual washers are: the wetness, the churning, the suds. "Randii gets off on bubbles," Tanya volunteers. "So do you, slut!" Randii retorts, before implausibly asking Mitch how he got into this line of work. Apparently he's always been good with his hands. Well, Tanya wonders aloud, are you handy with that tool of yours there? By which she is almost certainly referring to Mitch's freakishly large trouser snake and not, I presume, the outsized wrench he has been holding awkwardly this whole time. At this point, Mushroom's Foxy Music begins on cue; such is the infallible logic of porn.
Space-rock has almost always been something of a jack-off: a remote, phallocentric, cerebral trafficking in fantasy, produced and consumed largely by the usual host of Moog aficionados, fluent Klingon speakers and hobbits. But Mushroom's thrilling 1999 space-psych-jazz-rock fusion opus, Analog Hi-Fi Surprise managed to bring some much-needed levity and play to the genre. Mushroom tossed the analog weirdness of Füxa, and the jagged experimentalism of Can into a dark, smoking concoction alongside acid-fried Funkadelic, Jack Johnson-style Miles Davis and even some groove-addled Medeski, Martin & Wood. The result was some of the most instantly accessible outrock around, exploratory, up and infectious.
Following up the muddy and somewhat ill-conceived remix album, Compared to What (which featured Foxy Music snippets doctored by the likes of post-rock luminary Bundy K. Brown and Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler), Mushroom have transcended the interplanetary party music of Analog Hi-Fi Surprise and produced something downright luscious. The aptly titled Foxy Music melds pornographic funk, searing kraut, lounge-lizard exotica and swirling fusion into something hotter than the go-go girl who graces the album cover.
The shimmering Hammond B-3 that opens "Grooving with Herbie" returns us to the porno script treatment where we began. Flute and cornet blow acid-jazz loops over Patrick O'Hearn's incredibly tight drumming while the organ rumbles underfoot. "Grooving with Herbie" is a clean and crisp foray into funky exotica, conjuring images of lotions and lava lamps, silk robes, gel lighting and sex bereft of awkwardness.
"The Greatest Pleasure in Life Is Doing What People Say You Can Not Do" is a smoldering mix of garage-psychedelia and dark, smoky jazz. The walking bassline and squawking trombone mingle with Michael Bluestein's intensely bluesy organ. Guitars tweak and wail in the margins. The drumming begins to stutter and loop backwards as "I Got Blisters on My Fingers" erupts into bright, distorted guitars reminiscent of the recently departed Michael Karoli's squiggly fusion guitar work on Can's Ege Bamyasi. Michael Holt's Rhodes keyboards are simultaneously rootsy and otherworldly. The explosive "I Got Blisters" marries psychedelic blues and experimental kraut masterfully, on top of which Erik Pearson manages to make the flute sound ferocious. It's rich and trippy party music for ass and head.
Jon Birdsong's tuba is the standout in the strutting "Joe Namath." The fuzzy and dubby "Namath" creates a preening, cocky swagger with the unlikely elements of sitar, whining feedback, marching band horns, and delirious guitar shred. The carnivalesque and tweaky title track has so little subtlety it might as well ask you your sign. Foxy Music is noisy, hot and dirty, with Allison Faith Levy's breathy, indecipherable vocals packed into a crowd of screeching violin, electronics, Oberheim processed guitars and furious percussion. The whole thing writhes on the floor like group sex: sleazy, beautiful and breathtaking. You're never quite sure what plugs into what.
Mushroom's instinctual experimentalism remains intact throughout Foxy Music despite the bright, insatiable thrust of the album. "Getting in Thun" is a strange soupy throb of subsonic bass drone and eerily clanging church bells. "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for McGovern" lays a dark, paramilitary stomp beneath warped organs, recalling the unbreakable fusion of prog and fascism that seemed to infest Roger Waters' brain throughout the late 70s. But "Don't Blame Me," thankfully, serves only as a chilling (albeit muddled) interlude in an otherwise recklessly optimistic album.
All the album titles on Foxy Music seem plucked straight out of the pop cultural lexicon of the late 60s and early 70s, a time that's already been more carelessly romanticized than any other in modern American history. Yet everyone but the staunchest conservatives are willing to forgive artists for conjuring a mythic time when love was free and sex might just have been revolutionary. So who cares if Mushroom want to indulge in a little escapism? Sex in all its beauty, awkwardness, messiness and danger is a better subject than gnomes and nebulae. Mushroom (along with the inimitable Rollerball) are at the vanguard of movement to make experimentalism sexy again. Not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned.
And for those of you waiting for some closure on my script treatment, all I can say is this: a burly cop named Hogan shows up soon after the initial threesome. He wants to know what all the ruckus is about.
