PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE SOUND | No Wonderland (Eclipse)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You might not think that’d be a huge plus for hairy, wild-eyed, let-it-all-hang-out music like this, but the discipline that the members of Plastic Crimewave Sound seem to have learned from freakishly focused masters like Keiji Haino and Makoto Kawabata is more Shaolin monk than Sunday-school teacher. They elevate their instincts above their egos, occupying sonic space (or leaving it empty) according to the logic of the music–a way of doing what’s natural that paradoxically comes only from deep-in-the-bone training.
The guest-heavy lineup on No Wonderland orbits the core trio of Krakow (guitars and vocals), Mark Lux (bass), and Lawrence Peters (drums and percussion). Guitarist Cat Chow left the band during the album’s gestation period, and electronicist Andy Ortmann left afterward–they’ve since been replaced by guitarist Nick Myers from Vee Dee and keyboardist Amy Cargill from Sharks and Seals, neither of whom appears on the record. Devendra Banhart, Chris Connelly, Michael Yonkers, and Fursaxa’s Tara Burke all make spoken-word cameos, and it pleases me to be able to say they don’t sound painfully out of place. Here and there you’ll also hear Yonkers’s fuzz guitar, contributions by two different sitar players, harp from Josephine Foster, an otherworldly faery band impersonated by three of the women from Spires That in the Sunset Rise–and that’s not even the whole list.
Eef Barzelay’s new solo acoustic record, Bitter Honey, opens with the lines, “That was my ass you saw bouncin’ next to Ludacris / It was only on-screen for a second, but it’s kinda hard to miss.” Honey, the song’s protagonist, goes on to inform us that the other “hoochie skanks” who shake what God gave ’em in rap videos “ain’t got shit” on her–and “one of Nelly’s bodyguards” even “totally agrees.”
But that’s what makes Barzelay an interesting and unpredictable songwriter. Sometimes his silly-at-first-glance lyrics acquire depth and ambiguity, and sometimes they just stay silly. It’s like he’s trying the honey and the vinegar at the same time–you have to wonder what kind of flies he thinks he’s gonna pull. –Brian McManus
As members come and go, Scatter’s musical focus and creative processes shift: guitarist Nick McCarthy, for instance, left after 2004’s Surprising Sing Stupendous Love to concentrate on Franz Ferdinand, but that record clearly reflects his interest in avant-rock. The Mountain Announces, Scatter’s second full-length, is dominated by guitarist Chris Hladowski, who has an inborn love of Polish music and an impressive collection of Moroccan ouds and can make a bouzouki seem to weep. The marriage of deep intuition and wild abandon in his playing lends many of the tracks a desperately celebratory edge. “O Death” and “Delitier the Organ” recall the dark exuberance of some klezmer or the bristling swagger of a New Orleans jazz funeral.
