It speaks to Dan Melchior’s staggering prolificacy that Hunger, the new album by his Dan Melchior und Das Menace project, is made up of scraps. Culled from a pot of previously unused tracks Melchior has recorded over the past few years since adopting the Das Menace moniker, the record erratically pins down his singular vision of art-damaged garage-rock. It’s a wormhole he’s been wandering down with increasing crookedness since his start in the 1990s as a more straightforward protégé of Billy Childish, but on Hunger, Melchior’s fractured, punk-and/or-folk attack both helps and hinders his cause.
Melchior hasn’t hidden his adoration of Mark E. Smith lately, and a similar Dadaist scowl informs “A Wizard Doesn’t Need a Computer” and “Robotic Footprints”. The former stabs at a synthesizer until it emits a klaxon whine; the latter runs a beatbox through what might be Melchior’s own innards. Fragments of poetic nonsense are ground into chants. They’re fun, but Das Menace isn’t able to summon enough of the Fall’s seething loathing of logic to push them over the edge.
On the other end of the outsider spectrum, “Birdz” and “Parakeet”—the unifying theme can’t be accidental—find Melchior putting on his Syd Barrett outfit, stumbling through drifting zones of folk-saturated psychedelia and fields of diseased paisley. Melchior’s acid-troubadour inclinations are more convincingly heartfeltl; as a man who covered Jandek in the recent past, he takes one more step in that direction on Hunger by delivering a beautiful rendition of Kevin Ayers’ “Town Feeling”, beefing up the original’s imagistic haze with a “Be My Baby” beat and snarls of invasive guitar. It nests neatly in the territory between Melchior’s lust for ogre-like rock and his love of the elfin loner.
Garage rock rears its homely head on just a handful of Hunger’s songs, and it’s a welcome break from the disc’s less focused experiments. Like a cave painting converted into sound, “Rip It To Pieces” harks back to Melchior’s Childish-influenced roots with his prior band the Broke Revue, hurls boulder-sized riffs and blown-out fuzz backward toward the Stone Age. “Gonna rip it to pieces/ Gonna drop it in feces/ You’re an endangered species/ ’Til my anger decreases”, he howls as his voice and guitar bleed together into a gritty, joyous paste of hate. That punk catharsis finds a cleaner, catchier vessel in the form of the album’s title track, the closest Hunger comes to a pop moment. But on this record, Melchior proves skittish; every time the surroundings start to feel approachable, Melchior trawls a proto-metal groove, as he does on “Dungeon Blues”, or lapses into a murky, spoken-word trance, which renders the hooks of “Spooky Eyes” pretty much moot.
There’s another reason behind Hunger’s gnarled chaos: Melchior didn’t pick the songs. John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees—a kindred spirit if Melchior ever had one—is the album’s curator as well as its patron, since it's being released on Dwyer’s Castle Face imprint. Dwyer’s ear for off-kilter garage-rock is impeccable, but here he deals from a mixed deck. The tracks only barely hinge together with none of the hushed cohesion of Melchior’s last full-length, 2012’s The Backward Path. Granted, a specific mood, if not a concept per se, was guiding that earlier record.
Melchior’s wife, Letha Melchior Rodman—a guitarist of the unjustly overlooked '90s indie-rock outfit Ruby Falls as well the occasional bassist in Melchior’s band—has been battling cancer since 2010, and The Backward Path was suffused with the couple’s quiet, intimate struggle. In a way, Hunger is also colored by that situation; it’s partly an effort to raise funds for Melchior Rodman’s medical treatment. The songs themselves don’t dwell on or directly address that, though—which helps make Hunger feel fiercely if unevenly urgent, in more ways than one.
