What a beautifully kicked-over garbage can of a record! Jesus,
it’s weird. But Mike Fossum (Malachai’s evil genius)
has a playful ear for the good stitch, combining the Beach Boys
with the Velvet Underground and batting old school hip hop within
a few dusty Fall LPs. He’s like the indie music store clerk
version of Beck, his pastiche drawn from the harder, the less
polished, the further afield. These Sounds of the Spirit World
is a noisy mix tape with more nods than it would be sane to name,
all wrapped up in a spit-toothed punk sensibility. His disco punk
glitchy hip hop sounds more fully-formed that some of the other
mad lab hybrids. “Making Time Continental” could have
snugly sat upon Cex’s last record with its junkyard hip
hop undertow and cheeky fumbled flow.
Lyrically, Malachai writes an entertaining discharge of splintered
nonsense like, “Non-emoting patterns, wildlife photography,
they don’t got Pollacks in Poland hoe.” As funny as
that seems excerpted, it sort of hobbles the album in that the
music is taken so unseriously that not even a single joke is allowed
enough consistent follow through to give the songs a sense of
anything but the most cursory wholeness. The best moment on the
record is also the least stretched and mish-mashed. “O’Amy”
sounds like Built to Spill, The Beach Boys and The Fall, but still
manages to emerge as a sweetly cracked little nugget about being
scorned by a pretty girl. Stripped of the “fuck all”
glaze, Malachai cleans up nice.
Of course, the downfall of a rowdy genre car-crash approach to
making an album is the twitchy schisms that occur on a track-by-track
basis. There’s lots of “almost” here, songs
that give good first impression before collapsing under their
jalopy frameworks or just ketchup-corn flake combinations that
never accomplish much outside of asserting their incongruousness.
In an interview I did with Holly Golightly once she talked about
how what made old garage records great was that they were done
so flippantly with little concern that they would outlive the
next ten minutes. They were bold celebrations of the ephemeral.
In many ways Malachai harnesses that aesthetic to perfect effect,
creating a record that sounds tossed off, ridiculously unkempt
and not saved for a rainy day.
Terry Sawyer |
REVIEWS