Here's a self-released EP from a duo delivering on the promise of their self-titled debut. The title track, which could teach Milan Kundera a trick or two about how to deal with philosophical questions in a populist style, has made my musical year.
At the risk of sounding like a preview for the any of Harrison Ford’s ill-judged cinematic attempts to justify US foreign policy, Phil Rollins and Matt Resignola are The Gubernatorial Candidates. Their 2007 debut album (also self-released) showed them shaping songs through a shedding and donning of influences. That process continues with impressive results and head-scratching frustration on No Remainder.
First the annoyance: “Pyongyang” is far too short. Resignola wrests plenty of interest from a few hard edged acoustic guitar notes and a little processing but the overall impression is of a brief postcard from a Deep South equivalent of the Penguin Café. It's not a bad place to be, come to think of it. Except the track gives the impression we have arrived just as they are closing.
“Coffin (version)” is the latest of Rollins’ attempts to manufacture a vaguely African pulse into an effective pop-serialism; and he may ask himself, well, how did I get here? The single guitar riff, looped and repeated with a harmonic middle section is intriguing but ultimately it seems like a watercolor Reich-by-numbers with far too few numbers. It's worth remembering that Reich’s apparent simplicity is based on a rigid theoretical complexity and an astute sense of what to discard and what to explore. While the actual notes on "Coffin" do sound good, the piece doesn't bear repeated listens and ultimately amounts to the equivalent of a miniscule piece of rejected tape from the My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, at best. Plaudits for having the taste to try, but...
All is forgiven with “No Remainder” itself. This is a shimmering gem of which David Sylvian or Paul Buchanan might not be ashamed. All the better that, unless it gets scooped for a movie soundtrack, it will remain a largely unheard treasure. It needn't be that way, as sometimes the mainstream and the obscure can intersect: I recall the pre-mega Madonna listing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as her favorite so perhaps she can tell Guy to get this onboard for his next project. Either that or maybe the hapless Ford will mistake it for a pro-Nationalism thumbs-up. Stranger things have happened. Along the way, Rollins’ voice gets glitched by Resignola's nifty autotuning and the latter also slowly builds the dynamic with a rather fantastic wall of fuzzy guitar. The voice is good enough to stand alone but the glitching adds a sense of humans as machinery and of a relationship or system that is broken. The oblique song sounds part death knell part defiant celebration with clever lyrics which raise more questions on the unintended dehumanizing consequences of love and politics than Milan Kundera has answered in all of his novels. In the unlikely event, this will be my inauguration soundtrack.
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