Dusted Reviews
Artist: Mouthus Album: Slow Globes Label: Troubleman Unlimited Review date: Dec. 14, 2005 |
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On Loam, Mouthus hellhammer’d cruciform together with rubber riffs, and undulating tonal tentacles that wrapped reluctantly around ad hoc percussion. Drunken beats and jelly-legged cymbals pulled and scraped at each other until they all fell down, toppling over like a gaggle of toddlers learning to stand via age-old trial and error. The duo has gathered its legs, so to speak, and is content with pacing back and forth over shifting fields of pure abstraction, where subtlety is empowered with able tinkering, a willingness to stick with repetition, in hopes of birthing new sonics out of its formulaic womb.
On several occasions, Brian and Nate get to pass out the stogies, happy fathers to the yield of a Prick Decay, Neubauten offspring. “Go to Freeze” samples tommy gun from behind while bourbon’d hands slip into a guitar’s three loosely-strung strings. Voice ghosts from behind screens of distracting construction. White sparks from tonal saws scatter around the song, giving the listener not only the “finished product” but also the layout and execution of such in real-time. Reductionist tactics are eschewed with “Scatterings,” which is like spending the night alone in a country manor whose walls, floors and ceilings are crafted entirely out of Minyo and Biwagaku (traditional Japanese musics reliant on oral transmission), and an arachnid four-stringed slink. The night holds many monsters as “Scatterings” unfolds; ceiling meets floor with pebbled notes dropped into watery black basins. Walls are erased of their rock, disappearing in sound’s decay.
The duo should take note: When holding fast to a quality, not quantity slogan, it’s best to keep the music moving. And Mouthus surely does that, transforming by cannibalization; regenerating from simplified means, showing that modest mulch is usually the best fertilizer.
By Stewart Voegtlin
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Loam
