Labels: Kitchen Dweller
Review by: Chaz Hewitt
It took me long enough to find out which band is on which side of the lp, let alone what on earth is going on here.
The packaging is super minimal; all black sleeve, with a slab of white vinyl. Strangely suits the schizoid recorded output. With only indecipherable black metal-esque motifs on the labels on each side of the record I had to look at the runs in the vinyl to identify the bands by who had more tracks than the other. I feel this is all part of the fun, and there is an extremely useful sticker that gives you track names and a recipe for Burmese chilli chicken. Maybe you’re supposed to cook to these songs. I don’t know.
Ok, so first up is Upsilon Acrux (I think) with two tracks of noisy, jazz, noddling prog stuff. Brings to mind stuff like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Hella, John Zorn, The Ex; all bands they probably hate being constantly compared to, but to the hapless reviewer with a limited knowledge in this stuff it’s the best I could do, sorry, ok? This is 50/50 for me; I like the bits where they rock the hell out, but there are quite a few extended jazzy noise bits that I never find myself getting into.
Honey Ride Me A Goat are as ridiculous as their name. Over the top, Beefheart inspired noisy weird punk. I can dig this a lot. Again, this is well above par for this sort of stuff. I’m way more into this than the Upsilon side; less faffing about, and much more rocking out. Sure that’s not the point of this style of music, but hey, I’m only one man. Still think this could do with some seriously unhinged vocals, but cool nonetheless.
All in all, a pretty decent release, which I had great fun trying to decode. People into this sort of stuff should definitely pick this up, way more interesting and entertaining than half the stuff put out by big names in this field.