Jack's Lemmon: A Fistful of Fudge

 Although, Jack’s Lemmon, the Brooklyn-based masked multimedia collective, have been treading their own preposterous and shit-strewn path to artistic charlatanism for over six tedious years now, this film-flam of an album represents their first foray into music. We should have seen this coming, sneaking up on us from behind like a bear in the woods that has raided our grandmother’s wardrobe and is poised to bludgeon us over our heads with a single blow of its perfumed and elegantly-gloved paw. In fact those of us who were bothered to hover a peeper over any of the Jack’s Lemmon’s throbbing media outlets, where they haven’t stopped blabbering about this for months, did see it coming. Let’s hope it gave them time to duck.

Jack’s Lemmon first caught the piss trail of media attention with their series of art pieces distributed across the Canadian wilderness. It was called Caught in a Web of a Thousand Souls (seriously). It was basically a series of small churches (I think) constructed from the accumulated detritus of launderettes or small businesses or catteries or something (I should look this stuff up). They were designed to crumble in the elements, perhaps evoking a ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’, as if any of Jack’s Lemmon have ever had one of those. The reputed audience in the vicinity was a small clutch of squirrels, many of them children, and a possible moose (possible in the sense that it was possible that a moose could have been present, not that there was an animal that was possibly a moose, or possibly something else, like a … … well, is there anything like a moose, I mean, really, is there?) Nevertheless, some human forms were able to see this spectacle when satellite images of the pieces were relayed to the bored indifference of street-dwellers in twelve major cities across the world. Apparently it was all something to with ‘urbanisation’ and ‘community’ and ‘memory’ and blah and blah and blah. Other projects ensued, too numerous and badly thought through to go into any detail here about. Suffice to say, if you can picture an ill camel in a steep sided reservoir you’re pretty close to one of them. If you can't picture that, just end it all now.

Which brings us to this album. Yes, there’s a concept, and no, I don’t know what it is. Why would I? What I can give you is this; the entire album is one long 52 minute track. It feels more like 58 minutes. Trust me. Recordings of funeral sermons have been cut up and provide the beats. The 'd' of a 'dearly beloved' is a snare. The thud of the coffin hitting the earth is a bass drum. The wail of a grieving relative is some sort of woodblock I suppose. Over these beats are layered the grunts and groans from pornography soundtracks, stretched out and pitched up and down. A synthesiser doodles away in the background for the entirety of the album. I think a cat may have been walking on it. Finally, recorded samples of the band's own bodily functions punctuate the mess. It's worse than it sounds.

Adam Fluid is listed as the producer, presumably because he is the only member of the collective with any technical or musical ability in that he once illegally downloaded some music editing software and apparently he learnt the recorder for a few years at school. To be fair to the goon though, the production “ain't bad”. Notes sparkle, groans groan, and the thuds thud right where they should (somewhere deep in the bowels I'm led to believe). It's just a shame it sounds about as enjoyable as a wank into a fusebox. You can't polish a turd. But you can squash it into the carpet with your foot. I encourage you to do this.

Thorstein Gullheart: The Maggots' Incest

Thorstein Gullheart return with The Maggots’ Incest after a much-welcomed ten-year hiatus. Or should that be returns. What or who Gullheart is remains a closely guarded secret – his/their/its appearance on stage gives away few clues; the giant squelching dimly-lit mess could be the work of a collective of bodies, human and non-human. But who cares really? This reviewer, for one, had enough of the sort of droning stretched-cat blues that Thorstein Gullheart produced in the ninties. The thought of having to listen to this slime-fest backwater of a genre with this album is almost too much to bear.

In an interview earlier this year Gullheart issued this statement about its music from behind a curtain (and through a vomit-encrusted vocoder no-doubt): “Thorstein Gullhearts considers its music to be plugging into a matrix of free form signifiers constructed from the personal artefacts and disposed consumer shit of cultural masses, both at once life temples and garbage landfills, and by re-evaluating, reconsuming, and (re)presenting the nodes and faces of broadcast media entities, creates a meta-commentary that calls into question the cultural imperialism of discourses surrounding and underpinning the narratives of our age.”

It’s possible that even Thorstein Gullheart itself doesn’t understand this mangled fuck-up of a sentence. Unfortunately though, it’s the sort of waffle that pervades this whole album. Once, around 20 years ago, Gullheart babbled some half-interesting word nuggets, but ever since a stage blackout in ’96 where the pulsating pus-globe exploded, showering the audience in fuck-knows-what sort of slime globs, it has barely even expressed anything remotely approaching intelligibility. ‘Waffle, TV, Consume! Consume!, arachnids, blah, WTF, flange bucket, resist everything and sit on my face’ goes the first track (I’m paraphrasing). It is a testament to the sheer level of piss-in-a-sink awfulness of the rest of this album that I returned to this track for its vaguely hummable coda after sitting through the other ‘songs’, the marrow solidifying in my bones.

Apparently Thorstein Gullheart has already started recording its next album. I bet the recording studio stinks. What a tit.

Cassandra Blackhurst: Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water

 Cassandra Blackhurst returns with her sophomore effort continuing on where she left off with 2008’s debut Autumn, Come Unto Thee. The Tokyo-spawned, Ohio-raised, Columbia and Harvard-educated, and London-poisoned singer/multi-instrumentalist still trades in the same woozy, leprechaun in a box, broken synth‘n’plinth structures that marked out her first album, but this time strips away much of the urgency in the ‘found’ percussion, leaving the bombastic hits and squeals largely as something ‘not quite there’. They echo and they moan as before, but this time wander uneasily over the deeply textured surface of her voice, occasionally ricocheting with such force as to leave the listener bewildered, angry, or in the case of this reviewer, with an accidental glob of sick in the back of his/her throat.

On first listen, Blackhurst’s music reads like an equation. Parentheses, multiplications, addition and subtraction. These jostle up alongside each other like a 5am comedown where once mutual euphoria is tinged with shyness and embarrassment. At times it is as if Blackhurst herself is not even sure where to place these functions, and is comfortable to let them find their own positions. This is where the careful listener is rewarded, the songs unfolding in his/her/its ears like an origami swan picked apart by elves.

If the functions are variable, the variables, whether functioning or defunct, are not. Blackhurst connects the dots, draws the arrows, and circles the O’s and Q’s between proto-Italo-funk, acid-tingled rave-athon post-cock, sub-Sakamoto twinkling and hyphenated posture-jizz. And although these genres are all recognisably present in ooh, roughly 94% of Blackhurst’s songs, it’s as if she has raised an arched eyebrow to them before smashing them into the pigswill with her pale, and frankly stinking fist. Bobbing around in the trough, we (the listener/reviewer/pretender/proclaimer) are liable to pick through these remains like an elderly relative at the buffet of a wake where all the food has been replaced by wool. One may worry that Blackhurst would sneer at the very behaviour required to untangle the threads of the now sodden knitted cake that represents her music in this tortured and ill thought through metaphor, but she would do well to know that a sneer is one half of a smile and wink.

As with a clutch of other albums released in the last six months (Julio Stetson’s Namesake for Cherry and Tears/Tears’s Nothing But Whatever You Said It Was Or Would Be, to name but three) Blackhurst’s comes with a ‘story’. This is a clever move from the multi-singer/instrumentalist/future-banger as it serves as something to pad out reviews. Following the death (and subsequent re-birth) of her father, this former ‘lazybones’ has been holed up in a hermits' retreat in the mountains, recording the farting forest and wringing it dry for sound textures. The squawks, cries, and quacks of the wood-dwelling shitbrains provide the vertebrae of the album, and can be heard underpinning everything from the warbling drum blasts of Again, My Love to the wang-out guitar cockstorm of Only Under Stars.

Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water is an album. Is it? At around 43 minutes and 14 songs it certainly feels like one.