Rock concept albums are a dicey business. Rock operates on an intuitive, not intellectual, level-- it drives a shunt into your cerebral cortex, short-circuiting critical thinking, cogent analysis, and good judgment. Case in point: I am generally a rational person, and could tick off many a reason why dashing my body against a rock club's begrimed floor isn't a good idea. Yet, whenever some haircut gets on stage and starts just ripping it, my health concerns fly out the window and I'm transformed into something off a freak-show handbill: "He writhes! He raves! He crawls on his belly like a snake!" Rock creates a mental bypass via which its primitive, bodily allure goes screaming through the viscera, circumventing the anal little bean counters in the florescent-lit cubicles of the brain. Overblown concepts often, at best, distract, and at worst, annoy.
The Apes know from concept records: The Tapestry Mastery EP is their fourth. They've devised a handy trick for avoiding the sense of missed-points and intellectual pretension that can plague concept albums: They make sure their conceit is completely fucking inscrutable, too loose and arcane to muck up an immediate and quite righteous Rock Experience with untoward contemplation. The result is felicitous: The concept remains too oblique to impinge on the exigencies of the music, yet provide it with a sort of endoskeleton, a subliminal structure that occurs to the listener not as a set of ordered facts, but as a lingering impression of internal unity.
Tapestry Mastery revolves around the blind weaver Maximilla, who, in the introductory skit, is ordered by The Apes to "focus your grotesquely developed sense of hearing on the following tales and capture them on your loom. You have twenty days and twenty nights. Get to it, fool." So, wait, what tales? Are we to infer that Maximilla created the subsequent songs from tales we should assume were on the rest of the tape, or are the songs the tales that Maximilla must spin? And who the hell is she, anyway? If the concept is elucidated throughout the album, you'd never be able to tell through the layers of distortion slathered on the vocals. It seems as if it's more for The Apes' benefit than the listener's, but doesn't get in the way, and if it's an apparatus they require to write good songs, then I have no complaints.
One has to admire The Apes for their consistency, having changed little over the course of their career. If there's been any perceptible evolution, it's a thickening, a movement toward the modern no-wave of bands like Lightning Bolt, The Locust, and Pink and Brown. The abrasiveness quotient is at an all-time high here, and overall, it's effective in the manner of the previously mentioned noise addicts, although this writer wouldn't have minded a bit more strategically positioned minimalism to cut through the prolonged blast of super-thick organs and augment the impact of the loud parts.
While The Apes lack guitar, they've got this one organ sound that mimics a growling, overdriven axe with startling fidelity, and which, along with the deep waves of the low end, ballasts the mutant barrelhouse boogie. The title track surges in distinct movements beneath sweaty singing, with a pronounced loud/soft dynamic that's almost grunge. The frenetic "Warp and Wolf" opens with a brutal detonation that soon coheres into staticky, equalizer-flummoxing sheets of mangled organs arranged in punishing, psychedelic polyrhythms (think Oneida).
This level of intensity is maintained throughout the rest of the EP: low elastic drones, busy atmospheres, a rich palette of sonic embellishments, oscillating frequencies and coagulated noise. At the end of "Three Mages", the skit-format of the intro makes a jarring reappearance, as Maximilla proclaims: "And with this final stitch I have demonstrated my mastery over tapestries." But has she? Ostensibly, a concept record fails if the concept isn't brought to closure and doesn't manifest clearly to the listener, which this one isn't and doesn't. But my ears are ringing. The little tufts of hair around them are a bit moist, starting to curl. There's a dull afterglow of adrenaline. Seems like success to me.
