Labels: Who Can You Trust? Records
Review by: Captain Fidanza
First things first. This has been sitting on my shelf for about three months because although I have continued to receive mail from Andy Mal, I have been way too busy with other things to get around to listening to it. However, a few minutes ago I was watching a man dressed only in his pants punch the hell out of someone else on the YNC and I thought maybe it was about time I reconnected with the Collective, so I picked up the pile of CDs and put this one on.
Second things, second. This album is about as far away from the Spermbirds CD I reviewed last year as it’s possible to get. Spermbirds were a group of forty-five year old men who for reasons known only to themselves had taken six years to record an album which sounded twelve years out of date. I should probably be careful about saying unkind things about Spermbirds though, as last time, a young man with sunglasses on commented that “I must have liked lemons very much as I was so bitter.” It’s tough to recover from a remark like that.
“The Black Rabbit,” the first song on this CD, comprises an astonishing nineteen minute soundtrack to the coming apocalypse, with massive, rolling drums and swirling, distorted guitars. If you have ever been to Tate Britain and stood before John Martin’s “The Great Day of His Wrath” you will have seen the pictorial equivalent of this song as the sky turns the colour of a dying fire and mountains are ripped from the earth and fly through the air in front of you.
On the original vinyl pressing of CAN’s “Monster Movie,” on top of a black and red close up of what looks like a painting by Bosch, the words “made in a castle with better equipment” are printed. This music sounds like it was recorded in the biggest castle ever built by the people of Brobdingnag using instruments fashioned from black holes and giant redwood trees. If you gave a CD of this music to that shitheel from U2 he would probably piss himself before crying all the water out of his body so he ended up looking like an empty carrier bag.
As the record progresses, it sounds less like the end of the world and more like the end of all worlds. Yes, that’s right, you should probably get down to Sainsbury’s quite soon and redeem every last one of your Nectar points as the sky is caving in and by tomorrow, all that’s going to be left of civilization is a lone, backward child holding aloft a copy of a Spermbirds CD and grunting unintelligibly, before bringing it down with a heavy thud upon a large pile of other Spermbirds CDs. Then Stanley will say “cut” and we’ll all have to move into Amon Duul’s tool shed to think about how we’re going to deal with things now.
One of the songs on here is forty minutes long. Forty fucking minutes. It’s called “Father Sky, Mother Earth” and just goes on and on and on and on, but it’s okay that it goes on and on and on and on because it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before and I’ve no idea at all where it’s ending up. There’s still 3:26 left of this song and I find myself almost unable to order my thoughts as I’m so overcome by how incredible an experience it has been to listen to this record. I haven’t felt like this since I went to see Godspeed last December at the Troxy and stared at the pattern on the carpet for so long it started moving around; it was like I’d been hit by one of those poisoned darts from Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear. “Eh-Tar Holmes, Eh-Tar.”
You can download this album from The Cosmic Dead website for only £5.50 and if you do nothing else of worth today, I strongly urge you to do this. What the hell can you buy for £5.50 these days anyway? I went to the Costcutter round the corner yesterday and paid £6.78 for two oranges, a loaf of bread, a Crunchie, a Double Decker and a tin of soup. I don’t usually eat like this you understand but I accidentally drank some curdled milk last Thursday and I haven’t felt correct since.
This is, without question, hands down the best thing I have ever been sent by Collective and if any members of The Cosmic Dead are reading this, I sincerely hope you come to London soon so me and everyone I know can experience what it’s like to see you live. In fact, you could probably stay at my house if you needed to as I don’t think the Glasgow branch of the Northern Line stays open much past midnight.