The Great Tyrant’s “Candy Canes”/”Walking Through the Walls”
By Ken Shimamoto
We saw tears trickle down his cheeks and fall on the keys, which, though wet, were now struck in a strongly dissonant chord. At the same time he opened his mouth as if to sing, but from between his lips there emerged only a wail which still remains in my ears.
- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
In the climactic scene of his life of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn, the expat German novelist Mann might well have been describing a performance by The Great Tyrant. Arisen from the ashes of experimental outfits Yeti and The Pointy Shoe Factory, taking their name from a character in the classic Jane Fonda B-movie Barbarella (inspirational line: “You are so good you made the Mathmos vomit!”), the musos in The Great Tyrant have enjoyed playing “the dick in the coffee” (drummer Jon Teague’s phrase) for unsuspecting audiences while thrilling lovers of dark, challenging music since hitting the boards in early 2006. Released by local indie Dada Drumming with stunning cover art by David D’Andrea, this 7-inch single (on black-splattered clear vinyl with accompanying 4-song CD) is their first recorded manifesto.
The A-side of the single starts out as a twisted waltz, like a calliope about to come careening off its moorings, before mutating into a roiling vat of 7/16 turmoil. The dynamic shifts in “Candy Canes” recall Yeti back when the late Doug Ferguson was still around, as well as “Cossacks Are” from obscuro Anglo-American pop star Scott Walker’s 2006 album The Drift. Daron Beck’s F/X-laden voxxx have the haunting quality that garnered a scathing comment from Simon Cowell (“You should be wearing ladies’ underwear and red lipstick in a cabaret club”) on, um, American Idol a coupla years back. On the flipside, “Walking Through the Walls” is a throbbing, dissonant pounder, with Daron’s distorted keys and Tommy Atkins’ monolithic bass coming across as powerful as any guitar-based heavy band. Credit Echo Lab’s Matt Barnhart for the record’s immense sound.
On the CD, “Take Care” is formally similar to “Candy Canes,” at first overlaying a delicate filigree background with Daron’s groans from the crypt before shifting to an arcing, ascending melody over churning accompaniment: think electric Miles Davis – particularly Teague’s Tony Williams Rat Patrol drumming -- meets Magma (dig the music’s Wagnerian operatic quality). “Recounting Scars” is S-L-O-W, heavy doom-metal crossed with fin de siecle cabaret, the bleak soundtrack to a movie that hasn’t been made yet, Daron’s untreated voice an instrument of undeniable (if damned) beauty. “Closing In” opens with more horror show shrieks, which give way to a relentless ostinato that creates an atmosphere as claustrophobic as the song’s title would lead you to expect. The disc closes with a cover of Magma’s jazzy “Weidorje,” the debt acknowledged in full.
All in all, it’s an impressive half-hour-and-change worth of music from one of the Fort’s most consistently creative units. There’s more to come, as they’ve been ensconced at the Echo Lab cutting a full-length in recent weeks. The Great Tyrant will be at Lola’s on February 21st with Red Monroe and Record Hop, then at Sloppyworld in Dallas on the 23rd as part of the Melodica Festival with the Melodica Mystery Band, Sub Oslo, and lots more. In March, they’ve got shows booked at the Doublewide in Dallas, the Chat Room, and Rubber Gloves in Denton. Dig ‘em.
The Fellow Americans’ Search for Numb
www.thefellowamericans.com
By Ken Shimamoto
All musicians’ stories are the same. The ones I like the best are about groups of people growing up together through music. While the Fellow Americans’ story ain’t exactly that way, it’s about something damn near like it.
The Fellow Americans are, of course, the remnants of the late, lamented Rio Grande Babies with the addition of frontman Jeff Price. The RGB were a floating crapgame founded in June 2000 by guitarist/consummate wiseass Matt Hickey and singer Ray Kadleck. Their previous band, Explosive Fertilizer (1995-1999), displayed what in this post-September 11th/Columbine/Virginia Tech era might be considered an unhealthy obsession with the Oklahoma City bombing.
Kadleck repeatedly drifted in an out of the RGB, as did a couple of other singers and a Spinal Tap-like procession of drummers. Besides Hickey, the only other regular RGB member was bassist Hal Welch, a veteran of the ‘80s metal wars who picked up his axe again after a nine-year hiatus to join the RGB at the end of 2000 and stuck around until Hickey folded the tent in early 2004. (RGB fun fact: One of those drummers was Ricky Chewning, who’s now one of the organizers of Fort Worth’s Jazz By the Boulevard fest.) When they regrouped with Price up front in 2005, drummer Caleb Dissmore was also on board. They’ve already self-released a couple of EPs, no parts of which (refreshingly) are reprised on Search for Numb.
It seems Hickey hasn’t lost his OK City/Terry McVeigh obsesh entahrly – the new disc’s on Big BOOM Records, the cover pic shows mask-wearing paramilitary dipshits (personally I blame the MC5 for this kind of thing), and the opening song leads off with the line, “Shake it up and watch it all explode.” Oh well, consistency’s some kind of virtue, I suppose, especially musically: these guys play as if Motorhead and the Stooges were the only other bands that ever existed (listening to the intro to “Woodstock,” I half expected them to rip into Ig ‘n’ the Asheton boyzzz’ “Little Doll”), meaning their sound’s short on “finesse,” long on relentless forward motion and brutal guitar grind – a good thing to these feedback-scorched ears. It’s like a more powerful, assured version of the RGB, or the Me-Thinks minus the Haltom City mythologizin’.
The red herring here is fresh-faced Jeff Price, whose kinda awkward stage trip and emo-ish delivery make him seem a little like a Dickensian waif fronting a mob of cutthroats in a live situation. The good news is that he’s a lot better integrated on this disc than he was in the one Fellow Americans performance I’ve witnessed. His clear, likable voice has a bit of a rasp when he pushes, and he can actually hit notes and articulate lyrics intelligibly, which ain’t always the case with Rawk vocalizers. At his best (as on “The Way You Try,” the title track, and “CBL”), Price comes across like Gang of Four’s Jon King: a callow yoof standing up on his hind legs and howling into an electric maelstrom.
Hearing Search for Numb makes me wanna see this band live again, which I suppose is the point. Also worth checking out: Joe and the Sonic Dirt from Madagascar (http://www.myspace.com/jatsdfm), a side project wherein auteur Hickey gets to indulge his other obsession, with John Lydon’s post-Pistols anti-rock aggro Public Image Ltd.). Making Rawk implode: a much healthier pastime than making things blow up, methinks.
Little Brian’s Thrash Funk
By Ken Shimamoto
Metallic funk with horns! What the funk? But then again, aren’t trumpets and saxophones made out of metal?
Little Brian is a Denton-born instrumental band with a horn section, the key members of which (bass-guitars-drums-keys) have recently relocated to Austin. Bass player Sam Damask, who writes all the tunes, has spoken of making the horn charts available online so that any sufficiently motivated horn players can sit in. Absent vox, verbally oriented listeners who simply must have a text are referred to a self-published novel (to be sold at Little Brian gigs) written by the bass player’s sister Tarah Damask “to fully grasp the meaning and purpose” of the music. And here I thought that funk was its own reward!
I remember the first time I encountered the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on early ‘80s MTV. I was channel surfing and chanced upon 120 Minutes. Flea explained their style thusly: “We like to play like we have big dicks.” Little Brian’s music sounds like the Chili Peppers woulda if they’d had big brains. From the opening funkadelicious slither of “Slow Greasy,” this is feelthy stuff. On a typical song, the riddim section pummels you like Oscar de la Hoya, while the dual/dueling guitars deploy their whirlwind fury like nothing anybody’s heard since the multi-6-string-axe lineups of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society back in the late ‘80s. The horns don’t attempt post-Coltrane free-rock meltdown a la Steve Mackay on the Stooges’ Funhouse. Rather, they’re employed to add punch to Little Brian’s rhythmic attack and color to the band’s sonic palette.
“Ondarf” struts like the early-‘70s JBs in a manner not seen in these parts since Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings visited the Wreck Room (RIP) awhile back, and will get kids who never even heard of Jabbo Starks or Maceo Parker on their feet jammin’. “Bitch Gets Punked” and “Animal Cruelty” wind their way through a steeplechase of Zappaesque thematic shifts, sounding for all the world like leftovers from FZ’s Overnite Sensation-through-One Size Fits All period, minus the silly lyrics. “Car Chase,” with its high-note trumpet blasts, sounds like nothing so much as the One O’Clock Lab Band pumped up on steroids and human growth hormone. Listening to “Rat Damage” and “Slaughtered Seals,” one can imagine the splintered drumsticks and shredded guitar picks raining on the sea of banging heads and upraised devil signs in front of Little Brian’s stage.
Then as if to prove they’re from Denton, they finish it off by appending 20 minutes of Krautrock-like spacey noise, feedback, and musique concrete weirdness to the end of a track called “Party.” It’s the most willfully perverse use of the CD format since Mudhoney closed one of their discs with a “hidden” track that was the entire album played backwards. Now I definitely want to party with these dudes.
Oh, yeah: Little Brian’s Tim Burton-esque logo, drawn by bass player’s sister/novelist Tarah Damask, is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in eons.