With their debut release Flesh Eating Ants have thrown their hat into the Pink Dots and related re-issue ring. Tanith was originally intended for vinyl but stopped short at CD. Now over a decade later it has arrived in a most admirable fashion: remastered on two 220 gram Direct Metal Mastered gray platters in a dazzlingly colorful sleeve, hand numbered up to 512. The first LP is Tanith proper, slightly re-worked for the format, and the second the extras: the two CD bonus tracks and three new demos written and recorded in the wake of 9/11.
 
As with much of Ka-Spel's solo work, the music is mostly comprised of keyboards and an almost found sound sort of miscellany (guitars, radio, percussion, melodica) and involves members of his extended musical family of the time. The album plays out like a patchwork of disparate lyrical novellas and instrumental passages. It flows rather well despite some fairly drastic changes: a pretty piano ballad here, a cantankerous synth fit there, a soothing sound loop here, a cutesy harpsichord ditty there, an overdriven vocal here, a not quite a capella lullaby there, etc. Ka-Spel's gift at imaginatively setting a scene or sweetly serenading a lover with a minimal amount of poetry is nothing short of genius, proven several more times over with some of these songs. But quoting bits is criminal as each in their entirety tells the stories.
The finale "Hotel X" is one of the loveliest songs in the whole back catalog, a sort of hallucinogenic travelogue for Edward and his tired eyed partner.
Sides C and D complement 'Tanith' well. "Phoney War" and "Old Man Trouble" were written during the Gulf War and are on the more frantic end of the spectrum while "Diary 11th", "Diary 12th" and "Diary 13th" begin at and progress further toward the opposite end. By the 13th it seems that Ka-Spel was at a loss for words as the overwhelming sadness had fully set in. About all that remains is ten somber minutes worth of slow moving sound cloud, reminding me of the unforgettable images of massive walls of dust and debris filling the streets of NYC.
Well, it just doesn't get much better than this. Kudos to Ka-Spel and Flesh Eating Ants for the royal re-issue treatment: it looks great, it sounds great and it's greatly expanded. Exactly what pink dotted analogue enthusiasts are looking for.
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