Salicylic Reaches
The Bristle Cakes
Whorefrost Records, 2006

9.5/10

Tilting at multiple windmills – viz., in quasi-chronological order, their underrated and commercially disastrous sophomore long player Teats & Teratomas; bassist Tessa Pollo's pilates-induced nervous breakdown; and their jettisoning from Oklahoma City's Drip Drip imprint in favor of Whorefrost out of Sonoma, CA – Las Tortas Bristle have with album three (quelle surprise – who was it told you a couple months ago that these pomo mofos were the Oedipal ideo-foundlings of Fassbinder-turned-longitudinal-wave and Laurie Anderson's relativistically dynamo'd twin/cousin?) taken every pellet of dung flicked at them by fate and sublimated it into a nubbin of vibrating goddamn gold.

Statements of intent don't come less ambiguous than forty-second opener 'A Magnet So Powerful It'll Pull All The Iron From Yr Blood,' with drummer Stan Yevgeny's trademark π/4 beat molesting Pollo's Japanese-schoolgrrl fugue and Terafino's succulent bellows blasting nonsensyllables down a Phrygian gravity well. Answer: Metal Machine Music all over again, only this time meth'd to the gills and licking its own perineum.

You'd be released without charge, maybe even given a lysergic lollipop for your troubles, for finding something troublingly familiar in track 2, 'The Door Beyond Which'. Ten four propellerheadz: guitarist Tpx Wrlho's beguiling triplet figure is a verbatim lift from The Bristle Cakes (1998)'s swansong 'Clitoral Parsley', but with the notes played in alphabetical order. Creative block? Please. These guys could eat kazoos and shit the music of the spheres.

And fuck me if the selfsame conceit don't swing around again in track 5, 'Voluntary Cavity Search'. My colleague Callum Scrubb (of British phono Qur'an NME) described this song, in his review of August's A Scorpion And a Nipple E.P., as "the sound of thirty thousand milkmen fucking lonely housewives in a nuclear winter, while radioactive hedgehogs root in the dirt for the last sherbet loveheart in the universe." Can't say fairer'n that.

Ditching all the mawkish self-indulgence that hurt T&T's middle section, TBC have advisedly opted for pared-down arrangements this time, consisting mainly of Gregorian plainchant, Javanese gamelan, twelve-part chromatic guitar harmonies, African talking-drum solos and of course the processed Roswell abattoir samples 'bout which Gingrich kicked up a stink back in '04. The triptych of 'You Don't Have A Clue, Scribblers,' 'Shut the Fuck Up You Penpushing Dipshits' and 'Almera, Your Momma Drop You On Your Head?' with their intentionally overwrought structure and passive-aggressive production, calls to mind Aeschylus' Oresteia and Sophocles' Theban Plays in more than just threehood. Remember that it was 'Scribblers' in Chicago that almost got the Cakes' 2005 tour aborted, when Yevgeny played the solo on genuine barrels of biohazardous waste he'd yoinked from the Illinois Medical Research Center earlier that day. The merch-seller's boyfriend, just back from a tour of duty in Iraq, was hospitalized with chloracne. Clytemnestra anyone?

By track 9, 'Track 10', we have reached Reaches' outer limits, and the first phase of the four-track rectal-jazz finale which had the working title 'My Prayer Is Short, The Flames Are High, So Before My Spirit Dies: May the Bubbling Fat From My Burning Body Fly Into Your Eyes' back in the Oct '05 demos. My beautiful incurably bored-looking kohl-eyed self-consciously diffident ex-girlfriend (mutual split, differing opinions on Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, I right, she wrong, yeah you heard me bitch) Saaraa claimed she could tell I was running out of critical steam when I started quoting lyrics, so in the interests of fuck her, check Terafino's pukemajestic grime stanza 'Almera you make me sick / Whyn't you write with a pen 'stead yo' dick? You waggin' it about sesquipedalian imperious / We got the monopoly on takin' ourselves too serious' hauling itself, screaming and bloody, out of its own birth canal.

So lying there in the incubator it is, yes, yes it is yes, this Thalidomide homunculus of tectonic percussion and cochlea-raping vox and WTC-levelling low end and the bansaw pullulation of a priapic ax, these organs n' bones n' glands of a sonic cyborg (my god what have we done) – upending Minkowskian light cones to beam its curare-tipped gospel back through history and by a commodius vicus of recirculation way, way into the morrow – they are already rotting and I'll tell you why:

You don't know shit about music.

	- by Brant Almera
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