The Shunned Country

by Bob Drake
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath, Surrey UK, 2005
CD, CTA SC01, $13.00
Distributor’s website: www.rermegacorp.com, www.rerusa.com.


Venus Handcuffs

by Bob Drake
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath, Surrey UK, 2005
CD, Ad Hoc 06, $13.00
Distributor’s website: www.rermegacorp.com, www.rerusa.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

Forgive me for rethinking other artists' projects for them, but The Shunned Country really should have been a DVD. Granted, this CD, with its short snippets of exasperated vocal music, might play well on a radio show where it could spin in its entirety or (with the proper setup) episodically. Yet for The Shunned Country to have continuity, the cuts need to be paired with the twenty paintings by Ray O'Bannon (http://www.ravensblight.com) that appear reproduced in a little booklet accompanying the CD. The music is demanding and a bit difficult, while the paintings are traditionally illustrative, as narrative as those in a history or science museum's dioramas, and are drawn from the Lovecraftian story of an old dark house that is the backbone of the album. There could be a satisfying tension between the sound and visuals in an onscreen multimedia experience.

The paintings call to mind Rod Serling's unsettling 1970s TV show "Night Gallery". With the exception of instrumental cut #51,"Your Visit to the Shunned Country", there is nothing eerie about Drake's music here, only clamorous bursts of eccentricity. Think of the hokey three-second flashing lights and waving skeleton and the carnival spook house, not the dreadful moments of darkness preceding it. Every cut has the stop-time that is both interesting and enervating in the music of Frank Zappa or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Every one seems to end in a pileup of shopping carts. Even the Residents had less attention deficit and more rhythm to their short tracks. Drake's fingerpicked guitar and banjo are the musical clues to the story's rural setting, and he deserves props for avoiding the obviousness of using organ or theremin to signify "uncanny" and "weird". A reviewer in Top compared The Shunned Country to a soundtrack for the movie "Deliverance" as performed by Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. But the Captain's songs were memorable and hummable (and more appreciated with each passing year), while Drake's jet by like a jalopy full of revelers in motley and bright Halloween costumes. Where'd they go? What was that?

For this listener, Venus Handcuffs is Drake's more successfully realized project. When this album was recorded in 1986, Venus Handcuffs was a band, later to be called Hail, consisting of Drake and Susanne Lewis. The title track's opening heavy metal guitar chords and drums miked with portentious abandoned oil refinery echo meet a voice with that yelp of the dead characteristic of Niagara (http://www.niagaradetroit.com) in Destroy All Monsters a decade before. In the album's liner notes, largely about technical issues in its recording, Bob Drake reveals that the refinery is really the Mountain High Yogurt works in lower downtown Denver.

"Haebsibah" nails holler-in-the-shower vocals atop a footballer beat, but other tracks are gentler settings for the lost child side of Suzanne Lewis' vocals. "Dear Dear" punctuates dadaist plunking with circus big top snare drum rolls, "As Though Through Shadows" is as childlike as the late Nico's harmonium tunes, and "Birds Fly Out" seesaws under a sawing violin. Lewis sings "For the Rest of the Day" over a multitracked background choir of military monks, while clockwork xylophones define "Phantom" which, unless mislabeled, also sings of events slated "for the rest of the day".

All cuts are piquant and set the mood, but there are some standout songs and performances here. The perverted country music of "Gus Black Box" would find welcome in the godforsaken town of Machine in the Jim Jarmusch movie "Dead Man". "Fur Man" is head-swaying emo sung by a tired stripper with inflections of both Mae West and Romeo Void 's Devorah Iyall, its chorus "Baboon, baboon, baboon, baboon". And, as its drunken sax proves to be a viola, one readily envisions Lewis singing the cabaret-like "I'll Lead You" in derby, corset, and black stockings.