The Bevis Frond
Son of Walter (Flydaddy)
by Nik Rainey
Psychedelia. Ever since the first garage-band geek ingested a vial of Owsley’s finest and discovered that diminished G chord sounds really cool if you play it with your tongue, it’s been the source of music’s most farflung moments – the technicolor fluid gathered at the base of the backbone of rock experimentalism. No need to bother with lengthy and expensive study of (LaMonte) Youngian drone and (John) Cagey dissonance, just place that piece of paper with the cartoon rendering of Betty Boop on the cross wearing that rainbow wig Dylan wore in that horrendous promo poster on your tongue and suddenly, the history of the universe is emanating from your wah-wah pedal. Though it’s rightly been pegged a sixties phenomenon, psych has passed its damaged chromosomes down through the generations, dribbling off into the peace-love-and-four-hour-bass-solo realm of the Dead and its progeny on one side and the psychotic proactions of the twisted children of Syd Barrett and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators on the other. (Unfairly, the latter remains largely marginalized while the former gets package tours, vast entourages of unemployable morons in minibuses, and ice cream flavors named after them, although I can’t see how those fat tie-dyed capitalists up in Vermont could pass on a brand name as perfect as Roky Road.)
The finest neo-psych around these days comes not from the insufferable “Jerry lives, maaan” crowd, but from the scene that’s popped up around the way-dandy Ptolemaic Terrascope fanzine, bands like Olivia Tremor Control, Apples in Stereo, and The Bevis Frond, the brainchild of the endlessly-prolific Nick Saloman. This is spaced-out music with its feet on the ground, phabulous phreaky soundz that you don’t need to have your eyeballs bouncing off the Hubble to appreciate, created by folks with enough creative moxie to write actual songs to support their the-solo-ain’t-over-’til-I-hit-every-fret explorations. Son of Walter, the latest of what seems like dozens of Frondly excursions, marks a return to the methodology of Saloman’s very first recordings – every note on this CD was performed by Nick alone, and given the genre’s propensity for wankitudinalism and the gut-wrenching possibilities inherent in an 80-minute solo recording, he amazingly strikes nary a false note. His mastery of the form is astounding: bright acoustic pop numbers like “You Saw Me Coming (But You Won’t See Me Go)” co-exist with super fuzz chunks like “Barking or False Point Blues” and full-on space jams like the twelve-minute instrumental “Garden Aeroplane Trap.” Even better, he eschews most of psych’s faerie-dusted lyrical deficiencies, opting instead for earthbound dissections of interpersonal relations (albeit with drops of absurdism micro-dotting the landscape) sung in an appealingly reedy, often double-tracked voice that resembles a pubescent Julian Cope with one-fifth the pretension. A one-man en-psych-lopedia, Saloman knows his territory like few others, and Son of Walter once again shows him going the full (strych)nine yards.
(The Spare Me single is more of the same, only more aggressively so, with higher Fender-freekout content and neet time-release-caplet-colored vinyl.) This is potent stuff; abuse only as directed.
(www.woronzow.co.uk)
