mentholated paintballs: pain jerk & courtis, robert ridley-shackleton

November 7, 2014 at 8:55 pm | Posted in new music, no audience underground | 1 Comment
Tags: anla courtis, eyeless records, hissing frames, new music, no audience underground, noise, pain jerk, robert ridley-shackleton, turgid animal

Pain Jerk & Courtis – Pachinko Blast Anarchy (CD, Turgid Animal)

Robert Ridley-Shackleton – ‘big lug lurkin’ (7” vinyl, eyeless records)

Fucking hell, November already!  Seeing as the ratio of ‘days left in the year’ to ‘number of items in the review pile’ is rapidly approaching 1:1 I had better crack on.  There will now follow a series of quick-fire articles (interspersed with essential reading from Joe and Scott) with which I shall clear the deck, salve my conscience and do (partial) justice to the releases that have been entertaining me recently.  First up…

Pain Jerk & Courtis – Pachinko Blast Anarchy

The collaboration between scene veterans Pain Jerk and Anla Courtis is split into four ragged quarters. Imagine a Warner Brothers cartoon made in the dead of night by drunken, moonlighting animators. A bug-eyed toon chases an annoying fly around the house, failing to kill it with ever more outlandish weaponry: a rolled-up newspaper, a lump-hammer, a bowl of wet sugar balanced on a pile of bright red sticks of dynamite. It ends with the fly being pulped with a fire extinguisher in the basement of the wrecked house – a Technicolor parody of the horrific scene from the opening of Irreversible.

This darkly comic slapstick violence is measured out in sinus-clearing bursts atop a background of gushing roar. There is plenty of grain and variation to act as resin powder for your attention. There may even be, if you’ll allow me to stretch the definition of the word, a kind of brute narrative implied by the editing. The third quarter reins in the chaos, inviting the listener into a conspiratorial huddle, which makes the final blow-out all the more cathartic. As invigorating and colourful as being shot by a volley of mentholated paintballs.

Robert Ridley-Shackleton – ‘big lug lurkin’

So the first vinyl offering by blog-fave outsider artist Robert Ridley-Shackleton is a gloriously unfathomable four track 7″ EP (which, as all instances of this format should, plays at 45rpm). It is the essence of his art distilled to espresso strength. This is elemental rock and roll: all fuzz noise and breathy snarling. Not psychedelic, as such, but certainly hallucinatory – like a lean, grey whippet bounding up to you in the park, barking ‘hello mate!’ in a frighteningly accurate impression of Alan Vega’s voice, then turning tail to chase a cat up a tree. Great. Terrific collage cover art too.

—ooOoo—

Turgid Animal

eyeless records