Amolvancy's clear vinyl album and sleeve is reminiscent of the movie poster for The Day of The Locust. The music is shrill, cathartic, erudite and primitive: sort of like beating kittens to death with a copy of a French literature anthology.
In a sense, I don’t care what this record sounds like as its packaging is so pleasingly fetishistic. The disc itself is transparent but gives up no easy answers. The absence of a track list adds to the impenetrability factor. The vaguely Freudian and iconoclastic sleeve notes have a circular logic which lends the project an infusion of provocation, mystery and fake principles. Even the grooves in the wax seem like a labyrinth with no exit.
Sheila Donovan’s frenzied gibberish is backed by Volcano the Bear’s Aaron Moore and Dave Nuss of the No-Neck Blues Band. I say gibberish, but her words actually appear to be prepared rather than spontaneous improvisation. Amolvacy’s spiky tribal spirit takes aim at the bubble of contemporary morality even as it captures a foxhole somewhere between the mud-covered spunk of The Slits and the alluring irritation of Sue Tompkins (of Life Without Buildings). Worth sticking with and returning to as the grit makes pearls; eventually Ho Ho Kus, Po Po Kus.
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