Disappointment Incorporated
F=Q (Time Bomb)
by Jamie Kiffel
Ignition: Door chime bings six times, idle hums, lights blink on, needle indicators hop up and electric seat belts slide suddenly forward; automatic locks engage, radio pops on, you’re in the middle of an argument over Proust and you’re not yet halfway out of the driveway. At least this number of exquisitely precise, perfectly computed, independent functions are occurring at any given time on Disappointment, Inc.‘s F=, with incisive, Proust-worthy patter to make every measure check out like a self-scrying calculus equation.
Merchant Marine-cum-vocalist Brian Burns sings like a man trained to push everything into one ultimately engineered shot, or like someone who has spent his life in constant motion – in both cases knowing that this might be the only chance he gets to hit his mark, hard. Burns blasts it home repeatedly, firing from every direction and shattering every target. His slightly congested, vaguely Valley-twanged voice spans the musical spectrum, running up and down the scale and making every syllable count. He not only talks a great poem – from the Ginsbergian “American,” in which Burns personifies “power, credit, dirty bills” and “a lawyer smiles while a doctor kills,” to the glam cat-scream roughened “Bleeding Boy,” which induces cinematically strong images of a Vietnam vet and prostitute’s damaged son – but under all this mouth movement are fast, inventive guitars that rely more on involved picking than on power chords; scraping, lurching wah-wahs, and super-amped grinds that rev and overlap like an electrical symphony. Energy does not run down; it rechannels like an A/C motor. Mad rants evolve into the final track, “Almost Again (Our Summer Song),” a samba-rhythmed romance with sentimental, female back-up vocals.
From cathartic, soaring space noises to psychedelic, brain-twitchy breaths and minor chord shifts to enraged, alarmingly sober screams, this band does not waste precious air time with a single “uh,” “huh,” or “yeah.” Instrumentals and vocals challenge each other with rising complexity; poetry escalates as Burns sings, “I think we are all in Hell; it’s just a matter of temperatures” (in “Anna”) and the sinew-rippingly rapturous, throw-up-your-arms-and-eternally-collapse shout, “I’m vanishing!”
It’s not so damned difficult to get a band signed these days. It is hard to find a band that makes good on the space between the edges of its laser cuts. This is an exquisitely rare opportunity to hear fifty minutes that are actually worth your time. Line your body up under the tires and let Disappointment, Inc. run organ-deep tracks on the still-smooth skin you were saving for a really good gash.
(31652 2nd Ave. Laguna Beach, CA 92677)
