Wednesday, January 22, 2014

#1107 Pearls Before Swine - Balaklava

Another severely psychadelic album, most noteworthy because it has no drums at all, just voices and guitars and piano and horns and field recordings of veterans and birds and a damned bit of everything. But no drums.

There's plenty of folk out there that forgoes drums, but here we have all the ambition and scope of a full experimental psychedelic rock album, the kind of stuff that The Beatles and the just-reviewed The United States of America were doing. Not only that, there's not even a consistent rhythm guitar presence, allowing a democratic approach to timekeeping that undermines your ability to track tempo and the passage of seconds and minutes. Psychadelic folk, formless as it can be, still can usually be counted on for a tiptap on a bongo or something to track by. Even Tom Rapp's lispy delivery helps keep your grip on the moment slippery, climaxing in the harrowing tape experiment that rewinds the entire album back to start in a squall of squeals and screeches.

A little too strange, a little too unpleasant for its own good, but too fascinating not to recommend 3.5/5

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