With a name as punningly audacious as Sly and the Family Drone, you know they have to be either awful or possessed of genius – to the extend that the idea of the name’s connotations threaten to eclipse whatever their music may actually be. Having witnessed one of their deranged live shows – percussion-dominated analogue-tape-drone noise with a real sense of performance (it’s not every day you get to see a chubby bloke strip to his boxers and clamber atop a pile of speakers with a mic in his gob), encouraging maximum audience participation – I consider myself lucky to have been prepared for the sonic assault this album contains.
Of the three tracks, the first, ‘Handed Cack’ is the shortest, a mere five-minutes in duration and a tinnitus-inducing scrape of feedback that sears the senses. It segues into the darkly pulsating, harrowingly heavy ‘Grey Meat’. It’s bleak and unfriendly and builds to a violent thrash of cymbals in a whorling vortex of sound.
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Crashing, clattering discoordinated percussion and squalls of feedback howl in collision on the 19-minute finale, ‘A Man That Could Look No Way But Downwards, With a Muck-Rake in His Hand’. If it sounds like a pastoral painting by Turner or Constable in sonic form, think again: instead, it calls to mind the brutality of Prurient, before it builds to a savage battery of noise propelled by a motorik rhythm and culminates in a blistering frenzy of din.
Woeful, it isn’t. Moreover, it’s not only necessary, but essential.
Sly and the Family Drone Online
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