Old Time Relijun's heat-poisoned hillbilly calisthenics are an intriguingly cracked-out, shaggy-tail reconstruction of Captain Beefheart-- except that this band's version of the legendary acid-soaked California cornball would be decked out in a Black Candy t-shirt and smoking up on the leas of Olympia's Evergreen College. But to call these guys a mere knockoff would be plainly inaccurate: Old Time Relijun's longtime frontman Arrington de Dionyso (billed apart from the rest of the band here, for reasons which will become clear later) also shares some of the more rambling compositional leanings of sometime Relijun drummer Phil Elvrum's Microphones project, albeit stripped of its nature-boy preciousness and less successful in tossing disparate sunspots together into one unified, fuzzed-out menagerie.
Of course, Dionyso seems more interested in investigating animal languages, tongues of fire, and Walt Whitman hoboism than imparting any narrative epiphany to the listener. And despite his own purposeful eccentricities, he admirably transcribes his corncob dreams as though they're concrete maps to opaque surfaces; and not even half as pretentious as he could be, he seamlessly works Where the Wild Things Are into the refrains of his manifesto, A Kabbalist Exegesis of Old Time Relijun.
Sporting a John-the-Baptist-cum-Abraham-Lincoln beard and sounding at times like Yoko Ono conjoining with Tom Waits and Jad Fair to painstakingly rewrite the Jesus Lizard back catalog as countrified scrawl, Dionyso launches from Tiny Tim whimpers to high-pitched inhuman squeals, throaty bullfrog scat, and dewy mountain-top bellows in a matter of seconds. His gusto is impressive, but oft times lacking a clear-sighted cosmology for his discursive, shambling worldview-- his consistently twisted enunciations lose power, previously novel cadences blend into overdone sameness, and his rickety rollercoaster backing band becomes a predictable merry-go-round.
Varieties of Religious Experience, a collection of twenty-one unreleased sermons or unheard alternate versions of previously released material, is the band's first full-length since 2001's more successfully honed Witchcraft Rebellion. Twenty minutes longer than its predecessor, this longwinded retrospective contains a multitude of versions of certain bits of songs, often moving from Dionyso's one-man four-track work to the more fleshed-out approach of he and his rotating crew of back-up players. These are interesting as studies in composition, but the repetition slows the passion down, stalling the bombast into a tired holding pattern of indulgently predicated aftertastes.
Admittedly, though, one of the strongest tracks is one of these repeats. The first of two versions of "Telephone Call" showcases Prince's "Kiss" blended with a serving of Doolittle-era Black Francis-style preachin' man vocalizations: Imagine "Wave of Mutilation" as a soulful come-on, broken into staccato, and physically, freakishly dismembered. Another keeper, the organ-driven "Black Cat" introduces a nice shift to the standard foaming-at-the-mouth approach. Reminiscent of the Bad Livers or a jive-talking Daniel Johnston, it blends spoken gibberish, Ono-esque machine gun stutters, and a faintly audible sermon treading beneath increasingly vocal organ sustain into a finely catchy pop excursion.
There's much to like about Old Time Relijun, and Dionyso's previous dreamquests have yielded a robust stab at busted-plank outsider hiss, but on this unfocused retrospective, the randomly placed stylistic tweaks and vaguely useful repetitions can't raise the hue and cry beyond a mishmash of Trout Mask Replica envy. At the end of the spaz attack, it's the smartly plotted cohesion of Dionyso's proper recordings that creates a forward-moving juggernaut; here, amid the schizophrenic haberdashery, the autistic Hugo Ball schtick runs thin too soon.
