| In Bold Gardens |
It'd be good to think that The Monsoon Bassoon could deliver the same sort of jolt to contemporary rock. It's about time someone injected interesting new blood and viruses into the scene... Hell, not just the proggie scene the complexity of their music often suggests, but the indie pits, and the places frequented by the "Wire"-heads who've calculated groove to so many decimal places that they've forgotten how to move while they were at it. This bunch (best known to the fringe-indie scene and the Cardiacs family) are one of the few groups who could perform the Herculean task of pulling them all together.
These songs - for an album not yet finished, for a label not yet found - are here to give you some idea of how they might do it. At root, it sounds like a swaggeringly outrageous contemporary take on the rock-gamelan blueprint King Crimson laid down on 'Discipline'... but if so, it hot-wires that dry and academic Fripp legacy, and it blisters with psychedelic punk bravado. Closer, perhaps, to Henry Cow, the most fearsome, complex, driven band the '70s harboured and the '80s forgot, or (to take a more recent example) the emotional, gutwrenching take on math-rock delivered by the much-missed Slint. Soaring, folk-dancing flutes and trenchant clarinets overlap and dovetail themselves into the angular gaps between twinned guitars, which thunder and wail but simultaneously flip through complex ballerina moves and intricate insect marches. Drums and bass hold it down, but explode outwards like triggered man-traps. Three babbling voices swoop lyrics that twist like pretzels: now keening, now yelping, now opening up in wonder.
The math/prog-rock tag might suggest a gang of bloodless, facetious twiddlers. That certainly isn't the case with The Monsoon Bassoon. Strung out on woodwind and quickfire electric mantras, they're more like Mercury Rev pinned (like angry butterflies) to the sweep of Steve Reich's ten fiercest note-phases. Frankly, there isn't a single other band around at the moment that articulates the collision between order and chaos with the strength that this one does. There's an extreme structure here - mathematical riffs locking and knitting - but there's also a naked emotional punch: exhilaration, rage, a dazzling shape-shifting flamboyance, a Cardiacs-style sense of nerves exploding into life. Most obviously, there's a delirious, feverish joy in making music. Wherever the shapes allow (and they're more flexible than you'd imagine), the Bassoon go all out for it. Plus they've got pop hooks everywhere, like a porcupine's got spines. And (huh huh, huh huh) it rocks. Unquestionably. Like the proverbial bastard.
During their twenty-minute stay, The Monsoon Bassoon prick the bubbles of arty preciousness and punky noise-worship, and gather the remains together into a glowing twisty mass of hot, addictive fragments. The cartwheeling, backflipping 'Aladdin' is Lalo Schifrin meeting Rush over a pit of duelling scorpions, a mocking shadow-dance of fears and loss of control - "Open your eyes, / I'll take your sight, / I'll take your teeth, / I'll take it all: / contaminate you, no surprise / Where are your friends? / I have them now! / they're in my grasp... / You'll take the blame, / you'll take it all: / you know what's next...". And while 'Stag' grabs you by the hand, floors you with a dazzling grin and dares you to run across a live minefield, 'Siizdah Bedar' spreads bright metallic petals to the sunlight, sprouting like a fruit tree cramming a hundred spring-shoots into one giant growth-spurt. Their skewed pop sense hits a high with the Gordian knot of 'Flamingo Lawn': four hit singles trying to inhabit the same point in space and time. Then, at last, they rip the bottom out of your world with the deathly monster riff that's the keel of 'In The Iceman's Back Garden'. It's cavernous, bereft, and possessed of a monolithic overwhelming grandeur, like huge tears rolling down the face of an Easter Island statue. Dan, Kavus and Sarah wail like a heartbroken Greek chorus. Guitars descend like a rain of fire. Finally it all washes away in a flood of eerie feedback...
On this evidence, that eventual album's gonna be flat-out amazing. But then, as anyone who's seen their overwhelming London live shows could tell you, that's just what you'd expect from The Monsoon Bassoon. Fractalised, feverish and fantastic: and blowing up a storm.
Dann Chinn (Misfit City)