A Sneak Squeak

Posted by Bill Kent
7 Feb 2008

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!


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