Flop - 'Whenever You're Ready' (Sony 550/Frontier)

Are you ready for a hot take? Here goes: Rusty Willoughby is one of the greatest unheralded songwriters currently alive, and his best work stands up against the best work by Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Roy Harper or anyone else you might want to put in that canon. And that best work, for me, falls squarely within the boundaries of the three albums recorded by Flop in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately I only have And the Fall of the Mopsqueezer on cassette, which lies outside of the purview of this blogging project, so we must start here with their major label debut-swansong, Whenever You're Ready. The story of Flop, whenever it is written, which is rarely, is always the same - being from Seattle, they got signed to a major label in another case of right-place-right-time syndrome, this being one of the more crippling examples. They recorded this stunner of a second album for Sony, but because the major majorly fucked them around w/r/t promotion and marketing and general support (Steve Albini is always right!), the band collapsed in a mess of bad vibes and their third album, originally meant for Sony, went back to their first label, Frontier. We'll get there soon enough – oh, hooray for it being Flop Day on this blog! Willoughby's previous and future band was Pure Joy, who are also great, and fell somewhere in-between the Paisley Underground sound of Rain Parade/Game Theory and the crunchier melodic punk of Fastbacks (for whom he briefly played drums). For Flop, he brought in Bill Campbell on second guitar and the sound thickened immediately, especially on this record - er, sorry, CD. Campbell's guitar lines do a lot of chugga-chugga and pickslides and things that you hear on metal records, though it's not metal in the slightest; but it's hardly soft rock either, despite the acoustics of 'Parts I & II' or the psychedelic residue throughout. Generally, the production here is thick and booming, which is evident from the kicking drums on the opening 0:01 of the disc; one would situate this closer to the 'hard rock' genre than pop-punk were it not for Willoughby's angelic, soaring voice and the incredible hooks in his songs. Instead, Flop ends up in a maligned liminal zone which was doomed, even for the time; too heavy for radio play, too brainy for the heavy scene. But the songs are sophisticated, sometimes beyond belief;  that opening cut ('A. Wylie') is about An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw, so that indicates from the get-go that this is a far cry from whatever Mudhoney and Tad were writing about at this time. Second cut 'Regrets' mixes beautiful poetics ('And the leaves are convalescing / the sun is warming the baby seed') with verses of urban alienation over palm-muted heavy rhythm guitar. Willoughby's lyrics often implicate scientific/medical imagery (though more so on the later Pure Joy recordings) and mix in just enough pop culture references to conjure songworlds that are relatable while just ambiguous enough to create intrigue. A cursory listen may suggest this is merely a competent punk-pop album, a product of its time, but it's so much more. And maybe the competing tendencies of Willoughby and Campbell make the music so much more interesting; the sinewy guitar lead underneath the driving speed of 'Eat' gives it a catchy, clear direction; the production of 'A Fixed Point' makes it sound like if 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' needed its batteries changed; the back-to-back punch of 'Night of the Hunter' and 'Port Angeles' is an experience of pop perfection. The former has some of the most clever and quotable lyrics of Willoughby's career ('Solvents, glue and heroin/ she said "I don't want to do that at all" - and it's a song about the Robert Mitchum movie through and through!) and the latter explodes family tension with religious imagery. Legendary UK producer Martin Rushent engineered this and for me, as a 15 year old, I didn't initially glom onto Whenever You're Ready as quickly as the other two records, maybe because the production felt so heavy. But now I can't imagine this any other way. There's hardly anyone around who remembers Flop and probably even less as passionate about them as I am, but I urge you to investigate these three records, because for over 20 years they've been  endlessly rewarding and get better with age. The same can't really be said for the weirdly retro artwork, though again, I can't imagine this record looking any different by this point in my life - a life that has been mostly lived with Flop as some part of it.

Faust - 'Seventy One Minutes Of...' (ReR)

Usually if the duration is in the title, I find the task of listening daunting. Maybe that's the reason I never gelled with Seventy One Minutes Of Faust, which is really a combination of their last LP Munich & Elsewhere with some 70s-recorded miscellany, released much later. This hodgepodge lack of cohesion is also part of the problem - even though there's some great, zany art rockin' at play here (the blown out "Baby', or 'Don't Take Roots'), it's certainly not a coherent, self-standing statement like So Far or IV. And the presentation is murky and confusing - the titles are even hard to read on the back of the CD, the artwork rote and uninspiring. It feels a bit like the Faust version of Incesticide, scraping the barrel for completists, at least before their 90s reunion and subsequent split into two competing strains of Faust. Listening today, it's a lot better than I remembered it being, though there's no classic cuts, and the fact that there are seven tracks named 'Party' makes it hard for any to be memorable. These 'Party' tracks are actually the stronger material, though I'm not sure how many of them were intended for release; the fidelity is very crisp (the electronics on 'Party 1' float above the gurgling improv swamp, sounding like something from a more contemporary electronica-indie scene) and they just feel a bit jammy, even for Faust. There's some alternate versions of known Faust commodities; the first 'Party' is a slower take on the song from the beginning of Tapes, with a really nice layer of spacey guitar that brings this into Cosmic Jokers territory. 'Party 5' sounds like British art-rock, maybe some post-Art Bears RIO band. The closer, 'Party 4', includes everything and the kitchen sink (and lots of babbling in English and German). Despite how satisfying most of these tracks are if taken individually, it somehow doesn't add up to feel like much. Yet this stays on the shelf, and will be upgraded to a vinyl edition if one comes by, because, well... you never know.

Black Sun Ensemble (Camera Obscura)

Guitar Jesus comes to life in this debut release, reissued in the 90s with some bonus tracks and resequencing from the original mid-80s private press. Black Sun Ensemble occupy a unique, sun-drenched southwestern band of instrumental psychedelia. They're confident enough in Guitar Jesus's licks that there's little need for effects, studio fuckery or vocals. What this really is about is the guitar playing, and some of the songs are fairly improvised over a rhythm section that locks into similar chord progressions and patterns on every song. The end result is a patchwork of blistering electric guitar solos, glistening hollow-body/12-string blankets, and tunes that all kinda sound the same. The liner notes subtitle each track with descriptions like 'Wacko guitar solo', 'Improvisation in C scale', 'Blues in B Minor' etc. but somehow it all melts into a unified whole. I bought this when it came out after reading a review that praised it as first-rate psychedelia, but at the time I thought all psychedelia had to be insanely exaggerated mind-bends or maximallist pop like Mercury Rev or something -- I found this kinda downbeat, not disappointing per se, but not what I expected either. But I still liked it because I was also going through my Fahey/Americana-guitar phase, and I realised that this was a record to bridge the two schools. Guitar Jesus knows he's the star and he's mixed so far up that everything else sounds like an afterthought. If there's one criticism it is that the Black Sun Ensemble defined their sound too much, because the weird strum-pattern is so similar from track to track that it feels almost limiting. I know they made later records and I think still exist to this day (though Guitar Jesus is the only one remaining) so maybe they branched out since this was recorded (which was 1985). Much of the 'success' of this CD, to these ears, is owed to the early 80's DIY recording quality. You're really in the room with these guys, yet it still somehow captures the 'Dove of the Desert' feel (to borrow a phrase from track 5). There's something 'inside' about this psychedelia and it's a great mood-setter in the midst of a long winter. Liner notes by Byron Coley!