Records of the year: Sharpie Crows: Mass Grave/Golf Course

Firstly: Mass Grave/Golf Course is a phenomenal name for an album; conceptually, syntactically, juxtapositionally, comedically; it just works. It somewhat spoils the party when you understand that Mass Grave and Golf Course are the names of two separate EPs, but if you download one from their Bandcamp page, you get the other bundled in. Hence: Mass Grave/Golf Course. Besides, the artwork all but confirms it.



Cursory listens to older material show the Crows have made a leap into leftfield, swimming forcefully out of the shallows of vaguely garage-y post-punk and into a deeper ocean pitched in the weirdnesses of the San Francisco scene of the early '80s, some Texas art-trash, and perhaps the spirit of countrymen such as The Dead C and The Clean (if not their actual sound). This might sound tenuous and idiotic, but let me try this on paper: the accent and vague 'experimental' tendencies make Liars the first point of comparison, but they do not sound like Liars. However (and this is the big leap of faith) - it sounds like something Liars might attempt in a parallel universe, were they suburban rather than cosmopolitan.

When the band 'rock' they sound more than fine: you imagine that live, they would be completely unhinged. However, it is their slower, more expansive material that satisfies more completely: 'Communist Girls' is the sound of stumbling home, the air hitting the drunken in a burst of badly-directed anger, frustration and bullshit ("do you know what I did today? / I fucked a head of state today.") before arriving home and sobering regretfully. Better still is 'Country Music': airlocked, disembodied, and full of disquiet. "How can we make country music / when there's no country anymore?" they ask, sounding as if they genuinely want to know.



What the album signifies, more than its own excellence (which it absolutely is: consistently across 11 tracks) is the triumph of the democratised unsigned act. Everything is self-generated: the art, the recording, the image and thus retains 100% of its intended characteristics; the band as true auteur.* They'll probably never tour outside of their own continent, but at least we can hear them as quickly, freshly, and in context as their local fans can. The album costs about £2.30/$3.80US. Whether 'the Radiohead model' works for smaller bands is yet-to-be-proven, but at least they can compete musically.

*I know, this has happened for years - but now on microscopic budgets it sounds as good as records you buy in the shops that cost five or six figures to make, ordinarily.

Esoterica #1

The first in a weekly feature investigating some of the less familiar parts of the Art In Macro physical collection; from demos, to limited editions, bootlegs and vanity presses, unusual sizes, shapes and colours of vinyl. Basically the kind of stuff you can't find in the shops anymore, or never could.

Riding Shotgun By Starlight...With The Ominous Sigh!, "Just Trying To Find My Way Home"
TECHNICAL INFO: CD, self-released (Cheguevaraisnotdead Recordings), 2005

Scott Coleman, the brainchild of RSBSWTOS, is the subject of one of my favourite rock and roll stories. Whether it is urban myth or fact, I don't know. Importantly, it doesn't really matter; it was a perfect way of deconstructing the milieu of the man himself.



A friend, who was recording the debut LP (this one is the follow-up), set up the click track for Scott to play along with. Record is hit, and Scott plays the first guitar track. The rhythmic constant of the pulsing metronome is flatly ignored, the music wandering behind and then suddenly leaping ahead. The friend was tearing his hair out, anticipating a lengthy and irritating session of tracking and re-tracking. When finished, the friend, looking to tread lightly, informed Scott that it could do with recording again. Scott declined, preferring to record the second guitar line without the click. Obligingly, my friend did as instructed, despite how abstract and seemingly error-strewn take one was.

What happened next was magical; Scott played the counterpoint track in exact time with his first track. Whilst, to 'common' hearing, still seemed arhythmic and microtonal, it was all exactly as intended. His music had developed its own language, its own logic; it made perfect sense, it could be replicated endlessly, but only by him.

In the early days, his performances were the stuff of legend. Taking to the stage armed with voice and a Fender Stratocaster with ten pedals, billed as 'a one-man art rock explosion', he'd proceed to lay waste to the night. Simply ignoring the man was not an option; he either stunned you into attention or drove you fleeing from the room in sheer terror. This sense of room-bursting horror was heightened when he landed an opening slot for Monitor Records band EZT on a UK tour, bringing doses of sonic ectoplasm nightly.



The record I own is a later effort, when a rhythm section was added. Whilst it does reign in some of the more outre parts of the early material, the lengthy psychedelic/hard-rock tendencies remain, the shifting dynamics and heart-on-sleeve vocals remain. 'Fairfield, Iowa' is more plaintive, mourning a distant love.

He was in our life and is out again. Currently playing in a London-based band White Shoes, Black Heart - a more conventionally rocking affair.