Labels: Slow Fidelity
Review by: Captain Fidanza
The meaning of the title of this album is something to do with the Hebrew word for the name of God. About ten years ago I saw a film in which some loon thought he had worked out the name of the Hebrew God by doing some advanced mathematics, but the whole escapade turned him insane and he ended up trepanning himself with a power drill.
In case you haven’t seen that film, I can reveal to you that the number the loon calculated as being a numeric representation of the name of God was as follows,
9414324343151265932105487239048682851291347487602671959234
60238582958304725016523252592969257276553643634627271840120
12643147546329450127847264841075622347896267285928582953475
02772262646456217613984829519475412398501.
Anyway, I was a little concerned that after listening to this album I might be seized by an overwhelming urge to drill into the side of my head just to let the voices out. I was so concerned in fact, that I postponed listening to the CD and instead had a close look at the inlay booklet.
I’m a massive fan of inlay booklets. My favourite one accompanies Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s album “Ease Down the Road” because it has a beautiful, glossy cover with a colour photograph of a field next to the sea on it, but then inside, printed on strange yellow paper are the lyrics to each song accompanied by a series of strange, crudely rendered pencil sketches of things like an untidy bedroom and a dead pig.
The inlay booklet to “Tetragrammaton” contains the following,
A black and white photograph of a beaming Janet Jackson which has been cut out of a magazine with some blunt scissors.
Some bizarre, Shrigleyesque cartoons, one of which is a six-armed monster called the “Diagram Demon” sporting a diamond on his head and a five-pointed star on his chest.
A collage of a woman with her arms held aloft, doing a jump next to an enormous hamburger.
An early photograph of The Velvet Underground and Nico in which their faces have been cut out and glued back on upside down.
So that’s the inlay booklet and jolly good it is too.
The music is a bit of a mixed bag, initially sounding like The Flaming Lips with extra distortion, it moves through the Blues Explosion and several other things before finally coming to rest on De La Soul for a few moments before going on a quiet drive past Sonic Youth before remembering they had to drop a parcel off at They Might be Giants. So in short, if you like any music at all that was made between 1990 and 1999, there’s probably something for you here.
Largely due to the fact I was unable to reduce this album to an easily digestible soundbite, I went to Google and searched the internet for other reviews. The music website “rateyourmusic” allocates this album a wordless rating of 4.00 which is about as much use as if I had just walked over to my keyboard and typed the following words, before emailing them to Andy,
The Phantom of the Paradise, bob a job week, Walter Mondale, the making of documentary on the second disc, any more pie? brachiosaur, Germinal, five fingers of death, mouthwash, Didcot, basin.
Another reason to thank your God for the stringent editorial policies of the Collectivezine.