The Fall - 'Grotesque (After the Gramme)' (Cog Sinister)

This is a weird CD release because it pre-pends some early singles ('How I Wrote Elastic Man', 'Totally Wired' plus b-sides 'City Hobgoblins' and 'Putta Block'), but without anything in the liner notes indicating that. So 'Pay Your Rates' actually kicks in as track 5, and then Grotesque proper begins. Not a problem here - the singles complement the album perfectly - it's just that I only know what the song titles are thanks to my familiarity with the tracks (and the Gracenote CDDB database, of course). Repetition, cited often as an early Fall motif, is maybe most prominent here of any of these early releases - 'Pay Your Rates', 'New Face in Hell' and 'C n CS Mithering' (not to mention 'The NWRA'!) are insanely monotonous, drilling into one's brain with their back-and-forth soul-sucking. It's like a Michael Snow film, except with Smith's sneering lyrics providing a wild unraveling. 'English Scheme' has always been one of my favourite Fall songs, maybe due to the way that the carnivalesque keyboards blast over everything and the geographic evocations within the lyrics tweak my own fascination with British maps By this point, The Fall have evolved out of the punk thing entirely and arecreating something intangible but about their lives in Manchester. It's more confident, perhaps, less prone to hiding between Smith's bile. The keyboard and guitar interplay on 'New Face in Hell' is practically jazz. 

Butchy Fuego (Pickled Egg)

Whatever happened to this guy, anyway? Butchy Fuego is some weird visionary in Chicago who hung around with a lot of artrock/freejazz dudes, and made this beautifully designed solo record back in 2001 or so. And like most things on the vastly underrated Pickled Egg label, it failed to make much impact and thus, Butchy Fuego has disappeared into the pile of early 00s experimental CDs. A shame too, cause there's some astoundingly precise cuts here that run between spazzy neo-electro ('The Conquering of Planet Argotron') to Bügsküll-like collage mastery ('Music for Sarah's Film'). The opening would suggest that this is a very schooled bit of post-academy Henry Cow worship, but Butchy Fuego shifts gears constantly, with just enough cohesion to avoid feeling like a weird compilation. 'The Paleontologist' has some buried vocals, as the piece lumbers along in a sort of improv scuzz-rock, not unlike stuff like the Lowdown or Mouthus only a few years precognizant to them - the basement jam band returns in 'Menstrual Motorcycle', only significantly thrashier. 'Bumbleplight' actually sounds like Squarepusher at times, with a cut-up flitter-flutter that doesn't overdo the amp-buzz electronica, feeling again like a logical extension of the acoustic basis we hear earlier. 'Hot Balls' is my mixtape selection - it's an anthemic punch to the jugular that rips out of the speakers through it's lo-fi production, in a fairly calculated stance. But awesome nonetheless. I can imagine that Butchy Fuego is a fairly studio-based project, though the live instrumentation feels organic, not like samples. 'My Experience with Electronics' is maybe the centerpiece, both sequentially and musically. Despite the weak title, Butchy's throwing everything into the bag here and it gels nicely. The album comes to a polite close with 'Bunny', which is delicately sung like a Bedhead song, farting and wheezing until an accordion-driven 4-track indierock second part explodes. I shouldn't keep comparing elements of this CD to other artists, because Butchy Fuego certainly has eked out his own sound, one that should have found some fans. But fans of what? Eclectic, genre-bending art-rock, fractured songforms, complex compositions -- all things that sound great on paper but reveal themselves to be distinct and idiosyncratic when you actually hear them. But if any of those keywords tickle your fancy, then this is one to seek out, undeniably.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - 'The Mirror Man Sessions' (Buddha)

Here's a rare case when the CD reissue trumps the vinyl - Mirror Man was a record of leftover long jams from the pre-Strictly Personal sessions, a surprisingly uncommercial yet revelatory glimpse from '67 or so, though it came out in '71, if I have my timeline right. This CD sticks those tracks (maybe extending some of the first few tracks, though I'm not sure) and other, generally superior versions of songs that were re-recorded for Strictly, and in the process becomes one of the most essential Beefheart items, I think. 'Tarotplane' blends into '25th Century Quaker' which blends into 'Mirror Man' and it's hard to even notice where the seams are. These are exercises in horizontality, really the only time I can remember the Magic Band merging with the James Brown band, at least spiritually. Soul is actually present but it's as inside-out as you'd expect it to be. Somehow despite hearing these jams a million times I think they manage to surprise me, at least a little bit, every time. Whatever had infected Can and Neu! was clearly in the same smoke but the difference is all in the culture - Beefheart's band is all guts, worms and breath while the Germans have little funny tables next to their sofas. But furthermore, these long tracks are about motion - they move, slowly, like crisscrossing waves that rise and fall and gradually take you across to another island. The shorter songs are for the most part superior to the versions that ended up on Strictly Personal - for one reason, because they're so much more clear, though they are Krasnow as well. There's some great true distortion present on a few tracks - meaning the guitars actually break up because the amplifier/speaker can't handle the signal. The phasing stuff isn't here but it manages to sound weirder anyway. Because weird is not just prepackaged effects that everyone uses - it's in the songwriting, the performance, the expression. This disc is packed at 71 minutes and pretty satisfying, but it's also still a band in transition, on the verge of masterpiece.