The bent and sometimes broken musings of Ames, Iowa’s Matthew Dake (You Are Home) can pass for a few different things. Is it psycho-experimental indie rock, or noisy progressive post-art rock? (Why must we resort to so many labels?) There are flashes of various bands and suggestions of certain songs from across the broader post-post-punk-cum-noise spectrum (more labels). Sometimes they just flit around the underground rock library and point out different amusements, sometimes they go hang out under the bridge that Glenn Branca built while blasting Big Black at passersby on a shitty old cassette recorder, wishing it was an 8-track.
Dake is joined by several friends on guitar, Rhodes piano, trumpet, sax and vocals as they skirt the bounds of good taste and discernment and mostly wank off. “Pasolini’s Dick” sort of delivers on the intro to Branca portion of the show with diffuse washes of noise, but they never really get out of their own way. “Bore!!!,” oddly enough, is just that, a slow, kind of dry bore, an essentially empty vessel waiting to be filled with a glory that never really arrives as it should.
There’s plenty to unearth from within the dense mass, moments of transcendence, but they are fleeting and too few in number to keep some of this from being flat despite the racket. I never heard the deeply moving creative force that was promised. The three longer tracks lose themselves and the seven shorter blasts don’t have enough substance contained in them to do anything but fill space on the disc. The last song, “Sex Urchin,” sums things up well enough. 19+ minutes of wobbly, grumbling dirge-like waves that might be the Melvins goofing off in the studio. Is that really all you’ve got for us in a 19-minute long song? Sorry. I’m just sayin…
