One could argue that, along with Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed, Mayo Thompson was the primary oracle for a generation of art punks, industrial savants, and new-wave scientists. By its 1967 debut, the Red Krayola had already mastered the formula for faultless out-rock: free jazz, locked grooves, psychedelic pop blips, and a sense of humor somewhere between Burroughs and Borscht Belt. Listeners weren't sure whether the racket was the result of sharp intellectualism, sheer incompetence, or buzzed-out substance abuse. As a result, Thompson and his cohorts were typecast as avant-garde experts who spit out stacks of difficult song cycles. The myths piled up: Texan teenagers threw fast food at the band in shopping malls, John Fahey's promoters paid Thompson to stop performing, and amplified frequencies caused a dog to lose its mind. The Krayola became synonymous with strange-for-its-own-sake abstruseness and earned a reputation as a group that was easy to like but difficult to follow.
Introduction is being hailed as the Krayola's most accessible album to date, but that's backhanded praise. As 2004's excellent Singles 1968-2002 demonstrated, Thompson tends to wear his early rock influences on his sleeve. Growing up as a Houston arts student, he developed a distinctly American repertoire, referencing 1970s honky-tonk, piano blues, fried folk, and cabaret. By the time he was producing the Raincoats and the Fall, his music presaged-- and commented upon-- everything from synth rock to hair metal. Thompson's best songs are uncommercial responses to huge catalogs of commercial music. Despite its pronouncement of new beginnings, Introduction doesn't deviate from that tradition.
Coming after the tepid psych bursts and put-the-opium-down theremin of 2004's Japan in Paris in L.A., the new album is Top of the Pops material, revealing that Thompson is virtually unrivalled as an unkempt chronicler of pop history (only Zappa and Van Dyke Parks come to mind). Observe "Breakout", a rendition of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" which quietly connects Appalachian sashays and zydeco squeals. Thompson, a personable Pasadena professor, lectures on Leibniz, dialectical materialism, and "electrical surrealism", but his voice is far too conversational to seem pretentious. Other songs riff on the Indochina Wars and German Idealism, Chechnya and Israel, remote viewing and OPEC.
If these are gimmicks, they're effective ones, and Thompson's performance is memorably excessive. The lyrics are profound in their blunt dumbness: "Things come/ There's nothing sometimes" or "There are questions and opinions/ About what anyone can do/ About the situation here". Stylistically, the Krayola is typically diverse, unloading spazz-rock contractions over piano-bar lounge. But the most impressive tunes are the ones with minimal genre splicing. "Greasy Street" is anchored by raspy blues grit and "Elegy" spins coiled strums around faint harpsichord hums. The centerpiece of the album may be "Vexations", in which Thompson seeks euphoria while a bunch of guilty guitars wander around reluctantly, dragging their strings behind them. Overall, Introduction is less a primer on the Krayola's recent past than a return to Thompson's mid-70s work, without the blemished production. He sounds reinvigorated and flexible, open to far too many ideas for a 50-minute album. There's a fair share of undeveloped sequences and meandering noodling, but that's the price you pay for the effortless pop collages. It's a testament to Thompson's durable legacy that those flaws are merely quirks and that they sometimes feel more necessary than the songs themselves.
