Cured Pink on Black Petal Records

Are there no bands coming out of Brooklyn anymore? I used the think you couldn't throw an empty can of PBR without hitting a member of a Brooklyn band. Maybe they just aren't pressing seven inches? Are cassettes the new seven inch? Stupid old blog! Looks like Australia wins again sending in this single from Cured Pink which could be the best kind of single; the conceptual art 7". Andrew McLellan, the ringleader is interested in playing prepared instruments supporting performance pieces and and rigging IED's on television sets triggered by people at his art show while coming up with constructivist tunes with his three piece from Brisbane. It's that minimal Gang of Four inspired skeleton, shoving forward bullying itself into some kind of melody, only here they use instruments that you and I would recognize only occasionally.

"Body Body Body I Need It I Need It I Need It" plods along with a reverb bass line, sounding like an old sci-fi soundtrack with clanking metal pots and pans and the shifty warble and squeal of an old radio with crazy bursts of guitar distortion used as percussion. Maybe a thermemin back there somewhere over thumping kick and bass recorded in a stark, hard basement of piled up cinder blocks. This rambles on with surprising rhythm - a real art brut piece, pounding out a path through whatever natural elements they come across, like an The Sediment Club or a krunky, experimental Cabaret Voltaire (imagine?). I love how it's in a perpetual state of falling apart, barely held together with some sort of vocal off in the distance, possibly unamplified over a huge gong or sheet metal for a cymbal, they're going to keep you guessing at the individual elements. A glass bowl... enormous tin cans? This keeps a free form primitive beat with it's hypnotic effect that you'd have to watch out for with the limited space of a single but all the while sounding really live and that's key to any good junked up punk or experimental stuff, don't sit at home on your four track...find out what this is going to sound like out in the world, not in front of people mind you but out there in a barn or dirty basement. How thees guys interact spontaneously is the main idea of this.

"Amnesia As Answer" sounds like that train ride Tim Robinson took in Jacobs Ladder when he sees those fast head moving demon people. Once that train has left the station we're left with more repetitive regular beat clicks from sticks and verging on feedback muted strums. I think the most impressive thing is that the piled up junk noises are actually very rigidly kept in line for this delivery. Wide delay vocals that seem to get louder the more they echo, if thats even possible, somehow I could see these guys wiring that delay backwards or something. Bizarrely scary but exciting and post everything...these guys don't even seem to have a personality and I mean that in the best way, the only thing you have to go on is this music. I would believe these guys are normal PHD students who hit on this equation that was equal parts unsettling and exciting. Forget the lyric content, this turns into an exercise in self hypnosis. Excellent.

From Black Petal direct or the bands bandcamp page. These geniuses could break up at any moment because they're about to cure cancer or something waaaaay more financially profitable.

Cured Pink / Penguins split on Vacant Valley Records

This single came from halfway around the globe via Vacant Valley Records out of Melbourne Australia. A white vinyl split single between Cured Pink and the Penguins. If you believe that sleeve, Cured Pink is whipping a guitar with a chain and Penguins are carefully performing some kind of underground open heart surgery in their rehearsal space...with a drill. Their faces have been obscured to protect their identity, but the photos are enough to make this single go immediately to the front of the line. I kept imagining what these would sound like.

The Cured Pink track, "4:40" on the A-Side, delivers on that guitar whipping. Bad guitar. A single repeated pile of tones...some strummed chords, a bunch of single notes, some hit objects, far away metal objects. Some massive long delay thunder sounds, a sort of whine, from a bowed string? Low howls, metal pots and pans (according to the liner notes, played by unidentified children...pretty good). The entire track, Andrew McLellan is vocalizing lyrics with a heavy echo...which is probably that huge concrete studio he's in. But how does it make you feel 7inches? Well, it's a lot like a dungeon nightmare. Where there's some kind of machine, the repetitive thudding of a huge amount of never ending work. The voice far away screaming isn't too happy to be there. It ends up possibly hypnotizing the workers/slaves involved so the insanity takes longer to set in, and they throw themselves into the blast furnaces. It's a grim recording made from going out in the world and field recording these rooms and nontraditional musical objects...in that way it is awesome. His car was also broken into while he was banging away in the studio. At first I thought, "Did he have a microphone in the car? Oh, no he means that just sucked." The louder it's played, it gets exponentially disturbing.

The Penguins track, "4:17", (coincidentally these are also the length of the tracks) is more traditionally composed with heavy hit big room drums, all sorts of banging loops are repeated while a heavy distorted guitar works against this tom exercise, with bursts of crunch. This time signature only changes by which hit is being emphasized and the velocity of the instrumentation. It's a logical contrast to Cured Pink now sounds decidedly organic compared to this mechanical robotic rhythm. I'm almost convinced this percussion track could have been sampled together...it's a little too perfect. That goes for the guitar as well. Cut and paste the scuzzy chord together with a hundred others. It's got that The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste feel in the heavily gated guitar. There's some whispery growls and when a trombone eventually comes in it takes a while to actually hear it, providing this weird sliding unsettling terrible carnival feel. By the end of this, an entire orchestra is going at the stomping rhythm like that Ajemian brothers backwards "Into The Void".

Contact Peter at vacantvalley@gmail dot com for mail order, especially if you're not local to Australia. Pure white vinyl, with detailed recording insert (nice) and mysterious photo sleeve.