Artist: My Uncle the Wolf
Title: Flush
Type: Album
Label: Cargo Records
Sometimes I listen to an album and wonder “what on earth was going through their head when they wrote this?” This is usually a good sign. The start of “Grinning Hyena”, the fourth track of this strange album, is as disturbing as it gets. It’s everything between the experience of a thumping headache to that of nightmarish psychosis. It’s the musical representation of going through a hall where the visions are blurred and it’s impossible to think or see straight. “The Last Emperor” is more “normal” but unique with its tribal beat. We’re never far away from madness, indeed the echoey vocals are reminiscent in some ways of later, drug-infused Beatles work, or to draw a more modern comparison, the anarchic Norwegian band Atrox with whom the sound is at times almost interchangeable.
Do not however run away with the idea that “Flush” is just oddball. It is unusual and unique but it’s equally dark, heavy and even classic. I sensed the sound of Woodstock and psychedelic rock musicians of that era. There is a general pattern but part of the interest of this album is that each track has its own character. Much of the album is dark, sleepy and heavy and so it is at the beginning. The slow rhythm is groovy on “Big Darkness Soon Came”. The guitarist seems to be spaced out, as if he was on another planet. The sound is big but it’s as if the world is crumbling. One of the skills that My Uncle the Wolf have is to create a multitude of layers and mix them all up. “The Garden” sounds as if the Glitter Band has returned and is pumping out a grinding, dark rhythm. It leads perfectly into that track “Grinning Hyena”. In between the two, one imagines that the band had a few pints and some indeterminate substance to create this distorted and disturbing series of sounds. Is that the sound of whales I hear? The track struggles to get going as we float drunkenly through the hall of horrors, but eventually it does and works its way into a coherent, but still crushingly discomforting track. The album takes a slightly different direction with an Eastern-style dirge which acts as a filler, and then the ever disturbing and dark “”Feat of Fools”. The riff is driving but shares the quality of its tribal beat with the following track “The Last Emperor”. Slow, dark and depressingly emotive, “The Last Emperor” has a mystical quality, more than any other on this album. Another filler “The Devil is Tiny” has a Indian-sounding piped rhythm and is simultaneously hypnotic and distorted. By contrast “The Sun has Teeth” is slow, dark and ponderous, speeding up to generate a chaotic air. The next track “Moonshine” is like a piece of 1970s psychedelic rock with a bluesy feel. It would be suited to a smoky bar late at night. We’re then taken back to the constant tribal rhythm again on “The Duke”, a warm-up for the exotic drum beat of the excellent “Belly of the Night”. The beat serves as a foil for an otherwise deliberately languid track, noteworthy also for its powerful guitar interjections. For all the variety of the styles and cultures across the album, it’s brought together really well, none more so than on the final track “Carwreck’d and the Grenade Parade”. There’s an element of Sergeant Pepper going psychotic here. The whole experience is reinforced by the deep range of the guitar and the kaleidoscopic sounds which almost recall Hawkwind. It’s deep and heavy, man. The doom then finds itself mixed up with the music of a mashed-up brain, and finally it all goes haywire. It’s the perfect and most appropriate end to an extremely non-standard album.
Although it’s sleepy in places and overwhelmingly dark, “Flush” has so much going on and flows well in its peculiar fashion that it’s always interesting. You could call it avant-garde, experimental, psychedelic, doomy post-rock, I suppose, but whatever it is, this excellent work is mind-blowing in every way you could imagine and a number more ways besides.
http://www.myspace.com/myunclethewolf
http://www.cargo-records.de
