It was about six years ago. Sitting in my room at my computer late at night, I was listlessly trolling the pages of, the now defunct, IUMA.com (short for Internet Underground Music Archive) for new bands to which to listen.
The sad thing was, this was more a cynical pursuit than one born out of any eagerness to find fledgling bands over which to be enthused. By 2000, my faith in Rock was all but gone. I started thinking of Rock like one thinks of a loved one that passed away twenty years ago: a person that will always have a special places in ones heart, but one, the memory of whom, is fading from ones mind with each passing day. I suppose I figured that, if I cannot listen to the great Rock bands anymore, I could at least amuse myself with the cavalcade of mediocrity that passed before my ears as I checked out the bands on IUMA.
It was then that I heard HIM.
As I was going through the profiles of progressive-Rock bands that started with the letter k, I came across an artist named Ryan Kickland. On his webpage were a number of songs from his album 3D Collapsing Star. I clicked on the first track called Now Then. It was fitting that the song was about spiritual awakening and revelation because it was just that. I was thunderstruck by what I heard; it was as if Ryan Kickland had gotten a hold of the Rock-music version of the Necronomicon and was using it to invoke a song of the most frightful power like Abdul Alhazred summoning Cthulhu! In short, everything I loved about Rock was in that song in microcosm. I clicked on the next track: it was the same thing. The fact was each track I heard thereafter was equally astounding in its scope. After I finished listening to all of them, I realized we had a monster on our hands as fearsome as anything H.P. Lovecraft had ever dreamed of.
It was right around this time that Ryan was forming a band of musical kindred spirits in Sioux Falls, South Dakota...a band called Animalcule.
Not long after my visit to Kickland's IUMA page, I purchased his cd 3D Collapsing Star as well as Animalcule's debut album. Listening to them in their entirety left no doubt in my mind that this was a band that ranks with the all-time greats as well as the finest band around today hands down.
The following is a review of the band's second album Cerebellumusic. For the Animalcule acolyte, this is the best cd to use to be initiated into the mysteries of the band, as it give the greatest overall view of both band's sound and power.
Pulling no punches, straightway Cerebellumusic opens by disgorging a massive torrent of psychedelic sound in the form of Animalcule's elegiac indictment against avarice called The Suited Man. The song's intro, with Ryan Kickland's dark, loopy guitar lines flitting about like bats around a light and Patrick Ondrozek's keyboards providing wah-soaked volume-swells in counterpoint, engulfs the ear of the listener like one of those great Martian sandstorms grips the whole of the Red Planet from time to time. Then, as if the song's beginning was just a smokescreen to mask the lurking force behind, it suddenly gives way to reveal a massive, serpentine riff that snakes its way through the listener's mind like a sandworm rumbling through the dunes of Arrakis.
Along with the Jedi Knight-like precision of the band's musical chops, The Suited Man also shows the equally deft skills of vocalist and guitarist Ryan Kickland as an arranger and composer, especially of the parts he is to sing. Unlike your average emo songster, who can, at best, fashion but crude phrases to sing that slavishly follow the contour of moronically jangling chords her or she is playing, Kickland is a Vulcan of vocal melodies, forging them in the foundry of his imagination to be as cutting as the sharpest steel yet as delicate as the finest lace. Thus, like a butterfly fluttering between the coils of the snake in perfect time, the euphony of lilting voice and slithering guitar in The Suited Man is entrancing indeed.
As a caveat, if the late Stanley Kubrick were alive and directing a film about the fall of Enron, this song would be the perfect soundtrack for the scene depicting Kenneth Lay's dying moments.
After picking oneself up off the floor from the sonic assault that was The Suited Man, one is struck again by the wistfully subdued yet no less powerful Accessory To Man-Napping. An ode about having ones identity usurped by another, it shows still another trait of Ryan Kickland's that is the hallmark of a great composer: the ability to take the sparest of muscial materials and fashion them into a multi-faceted gem of a song. With only a sparse but incisive acoustic riff, interspersed by the watery chords of an of an electric guitar drenched in reverb and tremolo, Accessory To Man-Napping manages nonetheless to be a lush kaleidoscope of sound that swirls and eddies through the listener's ears. In fact, when it comes to crafting laconically lollicking shuffle ballads in minor keys, NO ONE can match Ryan save the mighty Syd Barrett himself, and now, with the recent passing of Mr. Barrett...Ryan is now king.
Next comes the song Animal Kingdom, whose majestic riffage proudly struts forth like a prancing lion. Spearheaded by Josh Hilpert's skulkingly superb bass riff, the song's rhythm stealthily prowls like the aforementioned big cat crouched low to the ground stalking its prey. Along with his bass-playing, it is here that Hilpert's vocals step to the fore as well. Like many a folk singer of old, Hilpert has an eerie and smooth baritone free of the annoying warble one hears in the singing of the grunge and nu-metal stylists that are legion.
In short, imagine a gothic Roger Whittaker on vocals with Robert Fripp on guitar sitting in on Jethro Tull's recording of Bungle In The Jungle; that is Animal Kingdom.
Next comes Animalcule's ode to the wanderlust of micro-organisms, the mirthful blues-romp Zygote Hits The Road. With its rambling rhythms and haunting whinny of its slide guitar, it evokes picaresque images of wending ones way through the dark swamps of the Mississippi delta or through the uterus (it is about a zygote after all). Think Bukka White meets the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack meets your biology class!
The fact that a group can play old country blues with such authenticity and authority, despite all its members being under thirty, absolutely staggers the imagination.
The sixth song on this album (and this reviewer's favorite) is the hard-charging Different In Town. Wow! Like Pink Floyd in overdrive to the point of morphing into Deep Purple, this song is a perfect maring of melody and power. Barreling down the listener's ears, the interlocking riffage of Kickland's guitar and Ondrozek's organ are like two wheels of a juggernaut, impelled by the cut-time groove of rhythm section (with Josh Hilpert on bass and either Ryan or Pat playing drums), which conveys perfectly the song's sense of madcap urgency.
Concerning Different In Town, imagine if you will the Droogs, that derby wearing street-gang from the film A Clockwork Orange, overrunning a small South Dakota town. Cavorting with only the finest naked myspace babeage, they hop from bar to bar, drinking absinthe like it is water and terrorizing old ladies and their grandchildren along the way...to such a scene this song would provide the soundtrack.
Like Frank Zappa before them, Animalcule are also the masters of infusing humor into their music. Unlike most alternative bands, who seek to be funny and ironic and only end up sounding stupid, the musical raillery of Animalcule is truly deft. This can be clearly heard on the seventh track of the album The Birds And The Beans. With its tribal/mongoloid chanting and its driving, Downs Syndrome-drenched rhythms, it is guaranteed to give your funny bone multiple orgasms.
Concerning, The Birds And The Beans, imagine if you will Karl Childers, the character Billy Bob Thornton played in Sling Blade, trying tell his young friend Frank about the facts of life. Now imagine that, while doing so, Karl is heating some baked beans to go with his french-fried potaters. Now imagine that, with his back to the stove, the thread of the buttons that fastens his suspender-straps suddenly snaps, causing his overalls to fall right at the ill-starred time when he had to release a dreadful cloud of flatulence (made even worse by the fact that he forgot to put on underwear). Now imagine the fire from the gas stove igniting the flatulence, causing jets of flame to shoot everywhere, including one that shoots into his rectum like a flamethrower scorching a pillbox, singing, to boot, all the hairs off Karl's body from his anus to his chode. Now imagine Karl, dumbfounded, looking back at the stove, seeing his baked beans burnt to ash, and then looking back at Frank, who, eyes wide with horror, says, "You mean that's what happens when people have sex? Shit you can count me out!" To such a scene, this song would provide the soundtrack.
Not queer funny...hah hah funny.
Perhaps the most dramatic and poignant piece on Cerebellumusic is the song So Blue. A languid ballad like Accessory To Man-Napping, one feels like one is soaring through the aural azure created by the gentle waves of sound that are Kickland's spacey chords as well as by the echoic, birdlike, guitar sounds, which he spreads like sonic glitter across the musical tableau. Concerning itself with the transitoriness of life and the waning of ones faculties during old age, it brings to mind the scene in Soylent Green in which Sol Roth (the character Edward G. Robinson played) goes off to die, placed in a room where nature scenes from his youth are projected on the walls all around him as sweet music is softly played in the background as he slowly passes away. This song is where Hilpert's vocals are sued to best effect, as his droning, girthy baritone, sung during the chorus, is like a powerful mantra, inducing the listener further to succumb to the song's forlorn mood.
From the gloom of So Blue, we shift to the sylvan spritliness of Black Silo. Replete with a rollicking mandolin, this pastoral number ambles through ones ears like friends sauntering down an old country road on a summer road on a summer day (which is what the song is about). This tune would be ideal to listen to when one is taking hay-rides whilst drink hard cider. At song's end, crowning the interplay between guitar and mandolin, which are lovingly entwined like a Celtic knotwork pattern, Kickland croons a lithely haunting vocal melody, reminiscent of the kind of thing Lindsay Buckingham would conjure up on a Fleetwood Mac tune. Showing off his otherworldly tenor, the melody Ryan hums hovers over the piece like a watchful spirit looking down on the revelry below.
In the tradition of Blue Oyster Cult's Harvester Of Eyes and Judas Priest's The Electric Eye, comes Animalcule's own ode to ocular invasiveness, The Wandering Eye. Like The Suited Man, this song too starts off with a maelstrom of melodic dissonance, whereupon The Wandering Eye then launches into a lurching pendulous riff, bringing to mind images of a giant eye floating a hundred feet above the ground...looking left and right for any hapless souls it can zap like a boy frying bugs with a magnifying glass.
Like a manic version of songs from King Crimson's Discipline album, the latter half of the tune then shifts into overdrive as Kickland and Ondrozek rake the ears of the listener with the tracer-fire of fast notes.
The last song on Cerebellumusic is the eldritch instrumental The Mickey Routine. With its chime-like keyboard figures, hissing cymbal-fills, and gurgling bass lines, it handily brings to mind grainy and scary films of the early seventies like Equinox and The Dunwich Horror for which The Mickey Routine could easily have served as soundtrack music. Also the dissonant saxophone notes wafting their way through the piece have a melting, deflating quality to them as if the Salvadore Dali painting The Persistence Of Memory had been transmogrified into notes. In short this song is a supernal ending to a supernal record.
An album of devastating power, Cerebellumusic achieves a standard few records rarely match, records from ANY era. Moreover, the music of Animalcule is made more exciting by the fact that it is created by a group that exists NOW , making music in real time. They are not a group from the distant past, who has either sold out, burned out, or died out. In this era of post-success, which Rock now finds itself, an era in which the fortunes of current bands are slim to none, it is a moral obligation that fans of Rock support the few bands like Animalcule that are left and sacrificing so much to carry on Rock's great traditions. The fact is excellence should NOT be punished with tormented obscurity such as Animalcule suffers. Hence we must support this band.
To order Cerebellumusic as well as many other fine releases from the Animalcule camp go to http://www.animalculemusic.com/ordercule/index.html Your money will never have been better spent. Also be sure to check out their myspace page at http://www.myspace/animalcule
In addition to the excellent albums Animalcule offers, they also provide ear-candy for that sonic Pez-dispenser that is your cellular phone. Two Animalcule songs in the form of ringtones can be downloaded at http://www.isound.com/animalcule/ringtones Not only will you get the best ringtones that can be had for your phone, but you will be able to support Animalcule further in their move to Tennessee.
As an epilogue to this review, the band's percussionist Clint Wood, along with being an excellent drummer, is also an excellent blogger, and he has his own myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/vuducat Sadly, like the Maytag Repairman (and Animalcule of course), his blog sits alone, its use untapped, the depth of its richness hardly plumbed. Hence I enjoin you to remedy this situation by adding him as a friend.
URL: http://www.myspace.com/vonbrach
