Five minutes into "Sing Your Own Song" a woman starts yelling at you. She's encouraging, like mom but angrier, like traffic. And her wording is awkward, so like church, too. "You are a natural-born music maker in the chief position of your life! The music and lyrics within your soul anxiously await to be expressed in sound!" Under the up-with-people-and-feelings sermon Tom Greenwood and whoever comprised Jackie-O Motherfucker that week gnash on electric guitars and set Slinkys down staircases. The whole thing feels like that episode from "Funkadelic: The Sitcom" where Eddie Hazel hung out with Swamp Thing against his parents' wishes. The remaining three tracks of Valley of Fire suggest that the music and lyrics within Greenwood's soul are rarely as dynamic and far-reaching as "Sing" but surprisingly do aim for the same brand of uncalculating emotion.
JOMF unfortunately no longer have an ear for true sonic disruption, and of course it would have been awkward if yelling woman had gone on like "You are a modestly revered post-rock veteran of some influence! You used to record turntables and construct amateur choirs and pawn off important pieces of American musical history!" which is probably what Greenwood actually needs to hear. To his credit, he injects Valley with enough subtle idiosyncrasies-- Public Enemy is hilariously credited for its contribution to 20-minute jam/chant closer "We Are/Channel Zero"-- that it outpaces its predecessor, 2005's almost sycophantically reverent Flags of the Sacred Harp.
Valley smartly sandwiches two slowly plucked sub-folk tracks between "Sing" and "We Are/Channel Zero". On "The Tree" Greenwood re-imagines the Beach Boys' static, muddy dirge "The Day in the Life of a Tree" as... a static, muddy dirge with acoustic guitars. It's a great fit lyrically, though, as Greenwood contentedly mutters, "Trees like me/ Weren't meant to live/ If all this world can give/ Is pollution and slow death," repeating the last phrase as someone slowly approaches harmony behind him. The Greenwood-penned title track is a pleasant intermission hummed in baritone, sweeter and less substantial than should be allowed of a band with "motherfucker" in its handle. Sequenced after these two relaxants, the "We Are/Channel Zero"'s improvised jam jumps off the plastic, roughed up by spurious snare patterns and smeared by Greenwood and Inca Ore's Eva Salens' sailing voices. Tough to definitively say that it's not a proper meditation on a 1988 hip-hop song about media and vacuity, so give JOMF the benefit of the doubt on one of the best long form piece they've submitted in years.
Back to "Sing", then, which comes by its religious overtones honestly, the product of Greenwood's collaboration with Salens and Charlottesville preacher/author/poet Uriah J. Fields. Fields operates the Beautiful Living website, which invites you to learn about "Three important books by Uriah J. Fields" alternately about race relations and God. This sort of unconscious emotionalism persists throughout Valley, in "Sing"'s earnest declarations, in Greenwood's po-faced deliveries, in a Beach Boys song about an outwardly depressed tree. Even the free-form jam is given purpose via its title and writing credits, no matter the vagaries of execution. Valley nabs the musical pieces of JOMF's dedicated free-form past and recent fondness for public domain hymns, but its refreshingly embarrassed affectations are its own.
