Jovontaes, "Paranoia Makes a Crazy Gift"

A library of space, a storage unit of magnetic moments, Jovontaes' Paranoia Makes a Crazy Gift is unstraightened garage psych surf that floats in a blank expanse of lo-fi experimentation and willful expansion. There are droney trilling moments, as in "Brewing," that seem to circle your mind, eventually kicking into something more groove and mad tom.

Formed from the 60s psych-garage force that was Tight Leather in 2009, Jovontaes has shifted between poles, anchored mostly by the presence of drummer-vocalist Reid Small. They're sounds change and shift through the sonic pilgrimages sought amongst home-built electronics between both Mark Murray and Josh Blaine (guitar and bass, respectively). When I saw them at Cropped Out in 2011, they seemed to be sowing wild drones that dripped with the grey skies that encompassed them. This recording parks in a maze of vast outer worldly communcations that seemed to have been recorded underneath puddles of audial aeronautics.

Dream-like space-time writhing written in a language somewhere in the backyard of surf-noise continues to survey the drone aspects of sound. "The Bend Before the End" is a William Castle jazz horror movie waiting to be made, being a constant battle between the drippiness of the guitars and the licks of overdrenching firepits cause by the Sun and and it's attack on us all. This is Cosmic Surf; not about exploring Space, rather getting severely Lost in it all. Electronics act as warning bells and reasons to remain in a paranoid aloofness, a distress call on a transistor made through a disconsolating wall of wah.

The entirety of Paranoia Makes a Crazy Gift is a landscape of scoped shots caught in sound. "Hill Top Sex Making" is crouched in a Kentucky woods during a rainstorm, breathing heavy and waiting for the river to quit flooding and the land to stop sliding along with Small's rolls. "Western March" is scrambling the morning after over dunes and through castle ruins in search of madworts and liberty. Or maybe not. Have your own visions.

Recommended.  

Available through Sophomore Lounge and probably at Astro Black Records.

Alcohol Party, "The Casual Sex"

Some kind of god made Alcohol Party to fuck with us. To twist our inner gears and skewer our ears into putty. This band's live shows have made me call in sick to the office in the past. No use slinking into a cubicle with a beaten, withered brain stem. Four temperaments spilled, soiled, sloshed through, abandoned, running across a linoleum floor, down a floor vent covered in cat hair/dust balls. The Casual Sex will make you vomit sanity from the pounding screws it drills through your cerebrum. 

This hits like a raw bone thud to the head. Several times. But in a complicated rhythm. Not just thud, thud, thud, thud. Some of that shit is 7/8 time. Or worse. Or better. I think it's taken a while to get my brain around this. Alcohol Party can be a loud rough noisy band. Alcohol Party is also some of the most complicated music being written in Louisville's landscape today.

Opener "Bee Trainer" immediately jellies the mind into tomato paste with it's hyperdynamic dissonance and strange jumps between chorus and verse. Make no mistake that Alcohol Party is loud noise rock n roll, but it strays so far outside any expected lines. There's a machine-tool tightness to the sounds and songs. The radar bouncing back and forth between guitar/voice/electronics by Zach Johnstone, drums by Jeff Komara and bass by Matt Watkins is a calculated erraticism.

These tracks are some of the fastest, loudest and most intense on record. The Casual Sex is like being in a room full of pulverizers set at speeds you can't guess; once you have a rhythm or some pretense of a groove down, another aspect of the song hammers from beside you, shattering your legs, crushing your hips forever. The angles in "Catholic Picnic" and "King Maker" get jagged. You might not be able to dance to it, but you can rip up asphalt and toss it at car windows to it. Johnstone screams rapid and afflicted like an abstruse neurotic, interjecting otherworldly electronic blurps through volumes of thick guitar. Watkins' bass is aggressively animalistic, matching Komara, who destroys drums with a monstrous measure and time.    

The Casual Sex gets my vote for the most intense thing released this year.

Rude Weirdo, "We Are Whores"

 

The creative insanity that Rude Weirdo smears over the playing field of a group of dive bar stragglers immersed in swill and debauchery, or even over the shitty stereo speakers as you sit naked at your desk at home, is as rapid-fire and hard to pin as greased shards of lust shot from a righteous, erect machine-pistol. You can stand somewhere in the night and try to comprehend the Orgy of Binge that exists here, but the plain matter is that nothing is Plain. Try listening to it in the abhorred confines of daytime hours and you might sicken and weaken, your cells screaming to escape sunshine and Vitamin D and kids laughing, and return to sticky, dark places and the sounds of whispered grunts.

The album is called We Are Whores, and it's not a pamphlet on the perceptions of the constructions of sexual reputation or indulgence. This is about licking and slutting, metaphysically, physically, mentally, emotionally, and just accepting your goddamn whoreishness. As the title song proceeds to inform, "We are whores, we lick the same tit." Is this a metaphor? Yeah. Is it a stark reality? Yeah. Get over it. 

It's both, and it's songs like these that make Rude Weirdo one of the most fun bands to watch and hear, as well as one of the most dangerous bands live. This is because we're dealing with some folks that, put simply, DON'T GIVE A FUCK if they offend you. And if you're offended by them, you probably shouldn't be there.

They give a fuck about the music, and the show. But I haven't been to a rock show in a while where I felt a smell in the air made me think anything could happen, with snap in the mental fingers of the crowd OR the band. The CD release party for this EP was a collage of bizarro dance rock, R and B and no- and new-wavish electronic thrashing; a schizophrenia that mixed with the taunts and heckles from the crowd at the band, and equally from the band at the crowd. There was a loosely-screwed energy that was heaped in palms and flung like piles of gluttony between the audience and performers. Sometimes it was uneasy, most times it was freeze-dried madness as singer Eric (or Adolf Oliver Nipples?) crawled and writhed on the floor through a maze of didgeridoo licks and guitar depravity. 

This album is a perfect follow-up to last year's No Pink, itself a collection of pop electro-punk lewdness (one fellow crowd-member told me the story of how he left No Pink with his weed dealer for a week; when he returned to buy more smoke, the dealer described how uncomfortable the EP made him and begged him never to leave anything like that with him again). 

We Are Whores cements in a squirted mess that Rude Weirdo are on top of the heap as one of Louisville's most intriguing bands: intricate songs that go unpredictable places. And it's slathered with humor in arched parts of its delivery, which most bands anymore are afraid to do. This is some of the best music, while ditching the oh-so-serious attitude that can afflict most music projects. 

I hear the pre-history influences of VRTKM remaining in some of these pieces, especially in the title number and the amazing closer "Hi Death," which blew my mind at the show. There are also some similar what-the-fuck sensibilities of Lexington's Rabby Feeber here. But Rude Weirdo have moved beyond into a brothel and bedroom of its own and are definitely the most clever binging in town.

Very fucking highly recommended.

Sapat, "L&N/Payne Hollow Stomp"

From some hidden place and another time, Sapat returns with this seven inch, two songs recorded in 2005. I hear they are completing work on their first full-length in six years. This surprise record acts as a teaser to a behemoth that becomes more and more anticipated. The two songs captured here are good representations of the ever-evolving psych-orchestra, going back in history a bit, as we await what the present incarnation will present.

 "L and N" is a loose flow, instrumentation fingertips in and out of the strands of the song. The percussion betakes a rolling network through the orchestrated environment, amplifying the psychedelic jazz folk that warms it. Wings beat, woodwinds wander, chewing cud, modifying their approach in the semblance of the ambiance. Colors are whole, and the dynamics never cheapen; the cavity deepens, the song thinks some more, then gets mysterious and gone.

Sapat never remains the same. Ever. Side B is "Payne Hollow Stomp," a mid-tempo dance that embraces the folk side of this incarnation, smathered in the psychedelia, embracing front-porch Americana that has been steeped and procured in vials of river water. Hell, is this a "driving song"? I feel like it is. The bob and hustle of it is a good-natured Americana in that it's a stew of genres, all sorts of roots and jazz, pleasantly gnashed through a boiler feed pump.       

This 45 is recommended. And I hope the release of the full-length, an entirely different mustering and noise, does not tarry.