So much of what Jim O'Rourke does is impossible to predict. His music either entices or disgusts and typically fluctuates between radical experimental work and more conventional "pop" records. With Mats Gustafssen and Thurston Moore in tow the result is akin to mechanical ambience: music that's probably best left ignored, but that announces itself too powerfully to be placed in the background.
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The artwork is hard to avoid; it might be bondage, it might be a scene from some porn gone horribly awry. Thrust into the foreground is a wrestling star, face twisted into a growl and painted. The text on the cover is Indian, perhaps, but might just be nonsense. The reverse side reveals recording information, band name, and participants, but doesn't acknowledge exactly when and where these recordings were made and whether or not they were part of a live performance in front of an audience, or a live improv jam in the studio. From the get go, the record seems like a bit of a mess, something to be thrown out to a bored audience that needs one more noisy fix before their next obsession can be found. The music is as messy as the packaging - a strange mix of continuous guitar noise and painfully bland noise generated by God knows what. Pedals, laptops, keyboards, feedback loops, it could be anything, but that doesn't change the fact that the sound is horribly monochromatic 90% of the time.
The use of a sax doesn't change anything, either. Its continual wailing sounds about par next to the rumbling garbage spasms that constitute the rest of the record. That's only the first track, the second one starts promisingly with all sorts of warped tones colliding with one another, but the presence of a flatulent short circuit mingles with all the other softer tones for too long. Before I can even invest some time in paying attention to one sound or another, this trio shatters what they've constructed up to that point in favor of more randomly generated tones and waves of distortion. I'm not sure if this kind of improvisation could be that difficult, much of what I hear could've been generated on a single laptop with just a guitar and a contact microphone for input. On the other hand, there are some dynamic moments on the second piece that sound somewhat enjoyable. Those enjoyable moments just don't last long enough to be enjoyed.
This recording, then, is about exactly what the cover demonstrated from the start: pain and confusion. Laugh all you want because I'm deciding to return to something that seems so trivial, but the inclusion of sexual bondage and laughable anger on the cover have to relate to the contents somehow. This is the result of sexual frustration, a desire to re-enact portions of various macho films and to tear down whatever walls are keeping these three musicians from releasing better music. If so little care was put into this album, then I wonder why I'm using up any amount of energy in an effort to describe all its shortcomings. I suppose I expect better, especially from O'Rourke and Moore. I know they both love noise, I get it, I've heard enough to understand that noise must rule their world. But, does it all have to sound like exploding cows of copulating moose?
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