Julian Cope’s Album of the Month
ThronesSperm Whale
AOTM #81, February 2007ce
Released 2000 on Kill Rock Stars
- Oso Malo (4.28)
- Nuts & Berries (3.08)
- Manmtn (7.00)
- Acris Venator (2.18)
- Django (2.45)
- Ephraim (4.16)
- The Anguish Of Bears (4.11)
- Obolus (11.45 or 45.47)
Note: Considering Joe Preston’s Thrones project has, in the past half-a-decade of our Album Of The Month review series, regularly cropped up throughout main texts and footnotes, it’s more than a little remiss of me to have waited until this Review #81 before getting it together to devote an entire review to this Primal Mover and Earth Shaker. In truth, however, I’ve tried several times to write a review of Thrones only to give up halfway through. But when I went to see Thrones in Bristol last year, the experience was so liberating that I threw off all my previous fears and determined to set to and deliver just as soon as my new book was completed. I figured even if the review was merely average writing, y’all still needed to be clued into this super druid.
One Ubiquitous Motherfucker
Joe Fuckin' Preston
Melvins' solo albums:
King Buzzo
Dale Crover
Joe Preston
Exeunt Joe Preston, pursued by a bear
Like its predecessor ALRAUNE, SPERMWHALE opens with the kind of statement that sends some gentle souls running out of the room, ‘Oso Malo’ featuring the kind of sledgehammer programmed drumming that can only make its point in a digital format, as the vinyl would inevitably jump all over the place. From the off, generic alien voices chunter to each other in a slowly descending staff elevator as the Preston horned bass charges down a spiral staircase armed with a claw hammer, attempting to block their exit, the merciless punctuations of programmed cymbals sounding as though – as he runs – he’s offing random flies and roaches (and taking out chunks of the wall simultaneously) with that same horrific weapon. ‘I’m pleased you appreciate good wine… have another glass,’ says an arch and cultured English voice, as ‘Nuts & Berries’ kicks off into a kind of Beethoven melody, horribly upended by bass crunch and catchy bastard Vocoder vocal refrain. For me, this is where the A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is at its finest, violence and aversion therapy and bass from the sub-basements of Berlin’s Bunker. The seven minutes of ‘Man Mountain’ (or ‘Man Mtn’, as it’s really named) follows, a raging vocal rant about something I can’t fathom, and propelled solely by the epic Preston bass riffage. Harmony vocals and a disturbed traditional melody lend the song a feel of compassion that makes the listener both disturbed and concerned… just what the fuck is going on here… and should somebody do something about it? The two minutes of ‘Acris Venator’ (Steadfast Hunter) inhabit a space somewhere between the opening of Amon Düül 2’s ‘Dem Guten, Schonen, Wahren’ from PHALLUS DEI and generic Moonlanding theme music, bleeping like an alien’s car alarm forewarning its owner that chav nere-do-wells are plotting its imminent seizure. Then, ‘Avon Calling’ tubular bells announce the arrival of ‘Django’, a programmed 6/8 Spaghetti theme sung in Spanish and propelled by ludicrously over-stimulated drum fills. ‘Ephraim’ is an almighty bass rendition of ‘lone bear lost in the woods’ music, Preston playing a mournful harmonized melody over a pulsing and woofing repeated sub-bass note, followed up by the crushing riffage of ‘The Anguish Of Bears’, again the programmed drumming busting your brain until the whole track opens out into a kind of sub-bass Mick Ronson orchestra of sweet harmonies… a drum break from the bowels of the Mother Earth heralds a screaming aeroplane disaster, before the main riff returns at half the speed and the track tails out in some truly sweet and fully-charged vocal/bass/percussion afterburnup. The album closer ‘Obolus’ commences with pure A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Teutonics, the multi-tracked voices and extraordinarily beautiful harmonies standing midway between Walter Carlos and Seventh Wave’s epic medley ‘Camera Obscura/Star Palace Of The Sombre Warrior’. This huge 3-minute beginning lasts just long enough for the ensuing Thrones riffage to throw us, as the sweet choruses continue, though now accompanied by the agents of sub-bass hell. This vocoded theme continues deep into a kind of doom take on industrial Krautrock, until the cityscape becomes enveloped in mists, and the darkness of nature takes over. The lone voice of an Ancient informs us that an era has passed, the gravel-chewing voice of some sub-sub-subterranean ‘Other’ agrees and the entire soundscape is taken over by the clucking of cicadas. It’s a truly fabulous finale to this epic voyage, and one that concludes far to soon. We can only hope that Joe Preston re-invigorates his Thrones trip in the near future, for his music is epically cinematic and effortlessly reaches the highs and lows of rock opera without ever needing to stoop so low as to tell any actual narrative. To Joe Preston, I cry: “Mein hairy, I salute thee and thy sub-basso profundo! Voyage onwards, Continental drifter, for we shall follow you wherever…”
Right fucking on!
FOOTNOTES:
- For those too young to know, the John Foxx-fronted early Ultravox had first appeared in 1975 as the Glam Rock post-Biba-styled Tiger Lily, recording for Gull Records. Their sole 7”, a horribly arch sub-Ferry version of Fats Waller’s ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, appeared back on the shelves in mid-77 just visible enough to embarrass the band, and Foxx in particular, who had formerly been trying to make it under his own name Dennis Leigh. In Liverpool, the audience contribution to the chorus of ‘Young Savage’ when played out at Eric’s punk club was “Spring cabbage… Spring cabbage!”
- LYSOL’s sleeve also proclaimed a version of the Coop’s ‘Second Coming’ from the same LOVE IT TO DEATH LP, but it turned out to be one of Buzz’s wind-ups.
- As an Englishman who’s been married over twenty years to a Yank, I’m still highly aware of how mysterious it is to we Limeys just how much Gene Simmons’ vocal style has informed the metal generations. As Kiss didn’t mean squat to my comrades, they always thought my wife’s Kiss and other Glamour Come Lately-types were cultural lowlifes. Being married to an American also forced me to re-evaluate such pop-whore bands as Slade and the Sweet, both persona non grata on the British rock pantheon, but lauded as the real deal in Detroit and L.A.
ALRAUNE (The Communion Label 1996)
SPERM WHALE/WHITE RABBIT (Kill Rock Stars 2000)
DAY LATE, DOLLAR SHORT (Southern Lord 2005)
Singles & EP Discography
‘The Suckling’ (Kill Rock Stars 1998)
‘Reddleman’ (Punk In My Vitamins 1999)
‘Senex’ (Soda Girl 1999)
‘White Rabbit’ 12” (Kill Rock Stars 1999)
‘Spermwhale’ 12” (Kill Rock Stars 2000)