Beta-Lactam Ring
They are thepale riders and frontier opportunists of a vast dream of untamedexpanses, deserted gold rush towns that coughed their last dying breathyears ago, unincorporated areas of land not under the jurisdiction ofany government, and thus subject to the brutal justice of itinerantlawmen and unscrupulous gangs. This sort of thing shouldn't surpriseanyone familiar with Tom Carter from his long-time membership in Texasunderground mainstays Charalambides, long reliable purveyors of aparticularly unique evocation of revenant country and blues spirits,but Friday Group takes things to a new level of purity, intensity andhypnotic perfection. The only possible reference points for thisfantastic debut would be Bruce Langhorne's psychedelic soundtrack forPeter Fonda's minimalist B-Western The Hired Hand, Neil Young's Dead Mansoundtrack, or Zoviet France's "Something Spooked the Horses." TomCarter and a group of improvisers that also includes Shawn McMillan,B.C. Smith and Blake Carlisle hit a chord that is long and lonesome,and succeed in making one of the most richly suggestive works ofpost-Americana that I've yet heard from the extended Wholly Otherfamily. The LP is packaged in a plain, "none more black" sleeve, butit's hard to work out if this is The Friday Group's idea or a designstrategy by Beta-Lactam Ring, as this LP is the first volume in theirnew Records Are Not For Baking subscriber series. Those whosubscribe to all six volumes (other artists include irr.app.(ext.), LaSTPO, Nurse With Wound and Aranos), receive all six LPs as well as sixbonus picture disc 12"s by each artist. I'm not sure that The FridayGroup's bonus 12" could be considered a "picture disc" in any sense,unless you consider a few sleeve notes and the color gray to be a"picture." I find the packaging of these two records bland anduninspiring, but it's the only thing that's bland about The FridayGroup, whose music is filled with dense textures and hypnoticatmospheres that belie the drab artwork. The LP is made up of twosidelong tracks of solid improvisation, Carter playing the holy fuckout of his beloved lap steel guitar, pulling out beautifully bending,curling wisps of opium smoke or gritty, sunbaked electric deathrattles, sending up a spray of clay dust or a spattering of saliva witheach sudden turn of his wrist. Filling out the sound are the thick,pregnant drones of McMillan's harmonium, and the vintage organs andelectronic guitar runoff of Smith and Carlisle, with the odd smatteringof windchimes and tumbleweed. The group doesn't meander long beforelocating a blasted-out, sunbleached skeletal blues in the midst oftheir stunningly evocative improvs, with the group carving out plentyof space for Carter's possessed solos. The LP is definitely where it'sat, but the shorter bonus pieces on the bonus disc, which highlight thegroup's gift for complex, shifting harmonic drone, aren't too shabbyeither.
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