A lot can happen in
twenty-three minutes. It certainly does in the new album by The Leg,
mercurial junkyard auteur Dan Mutch's manic spleen-venting
song-writing vehicle over four albums and the best part of a decade.
With cellist Pete Harvey and drummer Alun Thomas completing The Leg's
(un)holy trinity, The Leg formed out of the ashes of the trio's
previous band, Desc. Harvey was there too in Mutch's first band,
Khaya, who were way too out of step with the second half of the 1990s
they existed through, despite the acclaim, the John Peel sessions and
the wilful self-destruction.
Khaya's three albums,
Desc's sole full-length effort plus assorted singles and EPs are
available somewhere or other, and should be sought out post-haste. As
should too The Leg's two collaborations and another one on the way
with kindred spirit, fellow traveller and former Dawn of the
Replicants vocalist turned absurdist story-teller, Paul Vickers. Oh,
and The Leg's own '8 Songs by The Leg,' and 'What Happened to the
Shrunken Tina Tina Turner,' are pretty awesome too.
These years saw live
shows saw The Leg seemingly raid the dressing-up box kept hidden in
the paranoid wing of the local infirmary for live shows that saw them
grotesque themselves up in assorted panda outfits and wrestling
masks. Some might call it Verfremdungseffekt.
Especially
when they took the choir-girl chirrup of Mike Oldfield's 1983 hit
sung by Maggie O'Reilly, Moonlight Shadow, and pretty much assaulted
and battered it into submission.
Here and now, however,
while the songs remain similarly strange, both masks and gloves are
off, as Mutch, Harvey and Thomas follow up 2012's 'An Eagle To
Saturn' with a whip-cracking gallop through eight numbers that sound
oddly melodious, even as they appear to have come crashing down the
stairs in a Samuel Beckett vaudeville routine pumped up with
stumblebum adrenalin.
The opening strung-out
slide guitar of 'Dam Uncle Hit' sounds innocuous enough as it moves
into a rockabilly canter, but that's before Mutch starts declaiming
with demonic delight something which may or may not be about
tormenting an elderly relative with laughing gas. 'Lionlicker' is an
equally off-kilter romp that sounds like an infant's trip to the
local safari park gone wrong. Led by some jaunty hand-claps, it is
also the first song on the album to mix up Mutch's acoustic thrum and
Thomas' restlessly nuanced percussion with Harvey's newly developed
piano skills.
These flit between
silent movie chase scenes and, on the music hall clatter of 'Chicken
Slippers,.' Les Dawson after a few sherbets. 'Lionlicker' is
nevertheless fused with an apposite sense of child-like wonder at
something which has shuffled unwillingly off this mortal coil.
Possibly helped along with a mallet.
'Don't Bite A Dog' is a
forebodly urgent whirlwind that seems to involve Batman, gangsters
and other unsavoury types. The album's title track is a brief
impressionistic piano and percussion based instrumental sketch that
squints into the middle-distance in search of Zen-like satori while
someone next to them has a panic attack. '25 Hats' sounds like
someone left all the machinery on at the slaughterhouse, where the
owner has been bound, gagged and hung upside-down by a bunch of
Buckfasted-up psychopaths who think water-boarding should be an
Olympic sport.
After this, 'Chicken
Slippers' is a piece of light relief with its Keystone Cops style
musical prat-falls and magnificently ridiculous observations of
absurdist minutiae. 'Quantum Suicide' goes country style with a
nervily relentless but not unpleasant plinky-plonkified litany before
the album's finale, 'Celebrating Love,' promises happy endings and
redemption. By the time its frenzied Cossack burl around the dinner
table gives way to a tender meditation on jelly babies and absent
friends, the raging calm its reaches might just be an exhausted
up-all-night collapse into drunk-sleep.
Here then, is a feral
and dysfunctional thrash-folk jug-band that occupies an Edward
Gorey-like den of iniquity and sounds like an alternative soundtrack
to South Park and twice as nasty, but which retains a cracked,
fragile vulnerability that needs to get all this stuff out
lest sectioning be deemed necessary. And if it was stretched out any
longer than its blisteringly raucous twenty-three minutes like this,
give or take an extra fifteen-seconds pause for breath, perhaps we'd
all end up in the same boat, unable to cope with the album's variety
mad-house racket.
The number
twenty-three, of course, is blessed with a myriad of cosmic
inter-connections, as embraced by assorted mavericks, conspiracy
theorists and pranksters, from William S Burroughs to Ken Campbell,
who directed a twelve-hour stage version of Robert Anton Wilson and
Robert Shea's sprawling science-fiction epic, The Illuminatus
Trilogy!, to KLF founder and avant-provocateur Bill Drummond, who
designed the sets for the production, which opened in a Liverpool
warehouse turned cafe theatre on November 23rd (natch)
1976.
If there are any
conspiracies, coincidences and evidence of synchronicity here, it
comes via the psychic legacy of The Leg's capital city forbears. The
last time an album of such brevity sounded so urgent, so hungry and
so not giving a flying one, after all, was when that other seminal
Edinburgh band, Fire Engines, released Lubricate Your Living Room
back in 1980. Fire Engines played fifteen minute sets, packing more
life-dependent adrenalin-rush into that quarter of an hour that most
acts do in an hour. Paul Morley famously asked head Grateful
Dead-head Jerry Garcia if he'd heard of Fire Engines, pointing out
that where they did fifteen-minute sets, Garcia played fifteen-minute
guitar solos. 'Fire Engines or Boredom' went early communiques. 'You
Can't Have Both.'
While the same spirit
abounds here, The Leg don't actually sound anything like Fire
Engines, but are more akin to an even messier Edinburgh-sired combo
in the low-slung depravities of Country Teasers. Where Ben Wallers'
bile-driven band walked forever on the black side, there's something
more surreal and cartoonish about The Leg, even as neuroses simmer
inwardly. In this way The Leg are like Wile E Coyote, Chuck Jones'
animated Sisyphean figure chasing the forever out-of-reach Roadrunner
across assorted Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts. As with Wile
E Coyote, though, when 'Oozing A Crepuscular Light' goes off in your
face, you know The Leg will live to fight another day.
The List, November 2013
ends
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