Dedicated daemons at Dismal Seepage World Headquarters are
yearning, spurning, cutting, pasting and tasty cake tasting what
purports to be a new Thing Dismal album! An e-mail surreptitiously
intercepted from noted Top-of-the-Slops music critic Rancid Terrycloth
offers hints, and an occasional wince, of what we can expect from that
professionally practicing leader (and occasional soundscrape twoop,
beep and bleeter) Norbert Fragg has selected for the beastly band’s
heartiest attempt to escape disco-blivion.
We give you, Mr. Terrycloth:
Just
heard When I Say Stop, Continue, the new Dismal whizzer, and it’s a
pisser. His Norbertness, when not cleaning up unblocked rabbit poosh,
explained some of the tracks to me.
The disc begins with
B-Bump, a rousing, rhythmic ruckus sorta like Night Boat to Cairo on
downers. Norbie says it came to him during a day trip, by omibus, to
Moscow on Thing Dismal’s previous Eurotour: bump, bump, fucking, bump.
This is later repeated in the album’s acoustic closer, B-Boob. Not
about fabbo female features, this is mostly an impressionistic,
annoying agglomeration of string squeaks and New Standard Tunafish
note-bending that sounds too much like Intergalactic Booger Express,
itself a describing nasal penetration and desultory boogertronics
witnessed on numerous transcontinental flights. Norbert calls it one
more example of the act of mucous, taking one into its isolence.
This
is followed by Dangerous Cheese; a musical stopping, and starting,
referring to a moment some months back, when the interior improvement
efforts of a Mr. Stilton Gorgonzola, a highly skilled joiner, halted
his labors after Norbert photographed him without his permission. It
seems that Mr. Gorgonzola had stated in several languages (including
his native Episcopalian), that he must have an atmosphere of
respectful, undocumented, freely flowing, artfully stammering hammering
in which the house proud Fragg had to fork over his hard-earned pay,
abandon all expectations, trust the benevolence of reconstructive
surgery and otherwise permit hallway paneling to come into the world.
After some discussion, during which Norbert’s camera was confiscated,
the storage chip examined and found to contain images of mottled
clouds, gloomy streetscapes and scenes of potentially ribald rabbitry,
Mr. Gorgonzola decided to begin his work all over again.
There
is an inappropriate improvisation reworked from what Norbert had
offered as a free soundscrape download, Gas and Bad Breath; two
Mondrian Bayou environmentally challenged Beatlesque ballads vying for
single release: (Can’t Wait to Make Your) Nose Bleed and the inevitable
global warming warning, Coughing Up Air. There is the by-now obligatory
tip-of-the-hat to the band’s die-hard Japanese fans: Kuso O Tabero
Soshite Shine; a dueling drum solo called The Power to Re-Tool, a
further reworking of Inspect Before You Flush with bassist Owney Levoon
doing vo-coder recitals of A.E. Household’s poem, Plautus This Be
Stupid Stuff. Then we’re on to a bombastic Level Seven Eleven (which
sounds to me like an instrumental inversion of Into the Garbage Can on
the ancient Eruption of Spite album), and a controversial ditty with a
furiously Fraggish shred and characteristic twang-dang-do from Bayou.
Originally called Sometimes God Really Screws Things Up, that could be
called which Norbert sadly had to re-title for American release:
L-l-l-l-eisure.
And there you have it, Fraggophiles. Place your advance orders now!
