Clipd Beaks
Hoarse Lords
Lovepump United
By Jose Fritz
Clipd Beaks began in 2003 as little more than four grotesque high school kids with a marginally functional synthesizer and a cheap mic. They danced around the possibility of lo-fi experimentation but never bumped into the whole tarpit of psychedelic horseshit. Even the first EP, Preyers on Tigerbeat6 was immediately substantial. It was probably overwhelming to them with the burdens of obvious potential being what they are, but it was an audible version of what is found in a more granular form in small clear plastic baggies.
Every review you’ll read of this record will use the code word “psychedelic.” So it’s a trip. Did you ask if it was a good trip or a bad one? I’ll tell you now with all the bearing and raw will that permits us to live as we are: this record is a monstrous, hermetic gut trip. No alloyed belief, arcane image or archaic symbol can protect you. This record will fuck you up.
The album starts with a bouncing awkward bass line that sounds like the product of a late-night Devo-inspired jam session. The illusion lasts for mere moments as the noises creep in. It’s unclear if things are coalescing or falling apart, but the psychotropic freak-out is all too real. The record explodes into a storm wave of synthesizer noise and unintelligible animalistic grunts and squeals and I feel slightly ill from it.
It is immediately genuine, dissonant, hostile and profound. In brief instants they come together when the smoke breaks and the flames lay low, but the effects pedals, nihilism and the misanthropy always return. As do the dark figures, the wailing noises of animals in the slaughter room and the repetitive hiss of the pneumatic bolt gun. Lights flicker and shift across color bands making pithy trips into the realm of inaudible sound, imperceptible light and then return on fluttering insect wings. At the end they relax and the onslaught yields to a few minutes of acoustic guitar, then silence and then a hidden track reiterating the prior themes. E pur si muove!
The record is totally disorienting, my sense of proprioception was quickly eroded, giving away to an odd floating sensation. My limbs seemed not to be in their proper positions in space. I don’t think it would be safe to play in the car stereo.
The liner notes don’t bring any clarity to the vision. They read like a love note from the Zodiac Killer to the Vallejo Times-Herald. Strange sets of lines and shapes and crosses run in even lines across the page possibly containing an encoded message, possibly not. It might be the work of bassist Scott Ecklein or vocalist Nic Barbeln. It’s clearly from the hand of a disturbed individual. In all honesty they’re the most freaky and trippy thing to come out of Minneapolis since the Nichols Electronic Company started putting those music boxes in ice cream trucks in 1957.
|
