Tales of Wooden Wands, Vanishing Voices & Blissful Bong Hits
By: Raymond Cummings |
Monday October 17, 2005 |
| Based on their latest pair of re-releases, New "Weird Americans" Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice like to hit record while a little lit themselves. |
| Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice
XIAO (Destijl/Troubleman) - Two and a half stars Buck Dharma (5RC) - Three and a half stars Come along, if you will, to cruise moments from someone else's vaguely-recalled, quasi-halcyon personal mythology circa 1998 through 2000: Curled up on a couch in the second-floor apartment of your ex-girlfriend's boyfriend, hurting from three hits too many on a wine jug converted into a bong that has, all-too appropriately, been christened "The Green Monster," convinced that the fan behind you in about to suck you in; slumped and 'shrooming in an easy chair at a buddy's house, cuddling a hot-pink haired Troll doll you've decided represents an absent, life-threatening crush, flexing your brain muscles in order to make the vines in a living-room planter grow ever thicker and lengthier; radiating an unfamiliar blue, glowing buzz following a dip into someone's roommate's "borrowed" and apparently laced stash; kindly sharing the kind with a trio of dormmates over an episode of The Simpsons, and, despite laughing uncontrollably at every last rapid-fire joke, finding it maddeningly impossible to remember anything about the program afterwards. Yes, friends: I speak here of the world of illicit narcotics, and the states they make manifest, and the messy, disjointed mornings after, and the fact that I'm about half a decade removed from both. And that's okay: you get older, you start progressing, you get married, and even something as innocent as tying on more than a few Yuenglings on Friday night when Saturday's slate is clear seems ill-advised. Because when it's getting gradually harder to pull yourself out of bed to face the day, who wants to complicate things by getting wasted? When it comes to narcotics, well, who knows what's in the stuff, or whether a situation's around the corner that could precipitate one's arrest. No, indeed: fucking off when you're well-adjusted enough to realize that you've maybe got something to lose is no good. And that's why the good lord has given us freak-folk, or psycho-folk, or whatever SPIN called it a week ago, and its scarier, sometime tourmate/collaborator many-splendored cousins, noise and fractal, beat-leanin' chug noise. You know what I'm saying. Go on about the accidental-sounding-yet-pre-meditated, shambolic, stumblebum studio brilliance of this collective or the ethereal simplicity of that bearded weirdo or the anti-social violence of one trio of dudes from Michigan or Rhode Island or another duo armed with self-made instruments that lack proper names - it's all well and good to celebrate technique, the spirited furthering-qua-resurrection of sonic extremism or wispy implosion, whatever - but deep down, underneath it all, people like us dig this music because at its best it provides the illusion of being totally, amazingly whacked on some primo contraband of yore or a reasonable simulation of what we imagine same might trigger in us, without any of the attendant drawbacks. Excepter's ailing, eerie, throbbing synth-play, Animal Collective's dually euphoric-psychedelic Oshkosh Bygosh, Thuja's freeform, everything-is-everything collage, the Yellow Swans' creeping, ever-more-sophisticated electro-improv, Nautical Almanac's otherworldly, unspeakably weird dribble-drabble - great escapes all from the everyday. Based on their latest pair of re-releases, New Weird Americans Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice like to hit record while a little lit themselves. Their bonged-out sound is largely an amorphous clatter of plucks and finger cymbal clinks and plinks and scrapes sorta herded by James "Wooden Wand" Toth's grizzled, wannabe-preacher deadpan and/or Satya Sai's Grace-Slick-School-of-Celestial-Bliss soar. On XIAO they're a mite too loose (I want to say "strung out") to transport a listener anywhere trippy, but they'll have you rightly wishing you were solidly ensconced in a chemical-induced hallucination so your mind could reassemble the disparate detritus into that no-doubt astonishing sprawl the straight-headed are just a few doses shy of - they should've enclosed a couple tabs of acid instead of a miniature-print Thurston Moore teen-havoc rememberance liner. Toth's rich-creep-hangs-with-Jesus ("Paper Trail Blues") and whale-belly-stuck-Jonah ("Lions in Love") screeds are the disc's only lasting flavors; everything else rolls off the skull like water off a duck's back. A far surer bet, Buck Dharma helpfully connects most of the dots by doling out lifelines to hang onto: a ragged mist-stew of plucked, echoing guitars that amble around the same haunted half-melody, interwoven with Toth's "lonely sinners" ally-ally-oxen-free calls ("Rot On"); plangent, Icarian riff strands gradually intertwining to better bouy Sai's rapt shamen proclamations ("Risen From The Ashes"); a lumbering, shanty-town, fingertip callus-bruising ditty festooned with in tambourines, finger cymbals, and bells ("Satya Sai Scupetty Plays Reverse Jam Band"); threshing-like percussion, golden harmonicas drones, and societal unease threatening to gell, gather wits, and take off into the sunset, but resisting the impulse ("Wicked World"). Dharma's charms are more than enough to have you easing open your stash box - or at least wishing you still had one to raid. |
