![]() ![]() The trio of Paul Kirby and the Golemon brothers had been playing music together since grade school, Kirby the son of songwriter Dave Kirby (writer of "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone") and the Golemons the sons of songwriter Guy Golemon. Dropped from the Capital EMI roster, Walk the West subsequently transformed itself into the Cactus Brothers. It wasn't long before the popularity of the Cactus Brothers surpassed that of Walk the West, which was having trouble with the expectations of its West Coast label. With Walk the West cohort Will Golemon (banjo/guitar) in tow, the four soon started gigging around Nashville and the Southeast, playing acoustic sets that offered more of a traditional country sound than the country-rock that Kirby et al. After touring for the better part of a year in support of Walk the West's self-titled 1986 debut album, vocalist/guitarist Paul Kirby and bass player John Golemon joined with multi-instrumentalist Tramp to play at a friend's funeral. The album will be especially exciting for listeners invested in music projects that refuse to offer resolution or escapism.Originally a side project for several members of Nashville's popular Walk the West, the Cactus Brothers eventually overshadowed their alter ego to take on a life of their own. The title track begins with the punchline of a joke about white supremacist groups by Tina Fey, followed by short, repeating bursts of distorted audience laughter-laughter that eventually sounds like screaming, resulting in a long, uncomfortable confrontation with the reality that violence hidden in plain sight. The unsettled feeling it creates challenges those lofty mislabels of harsh noise music as emotionally stunted. In “The Display” harsh static noise occupies most of the song, but the more you listen, the more you hear something underneath that is crawling towards the surface. With blaring static and unforgiving waves of distortion, Woods has managed to create something like a sonic border, one that is permeable only if you’re willing to get close enough to it. Consisting of two long songs, “The Display” (13.5 mins) and “Awful Answers” (25 mins), the album is best captured by the image of someone throwing a TV into a blender and the TV refusing to die, with ghostly echoes of political shallowness slipping out. ![]() This new album works with the raw material of a monologue from liberal comedian Tina Fey as a way to criticize the ways that liberalism in the US addresses racial violence by showing “outrage while supporting that violence through inaction.” Simple Questions explored, according to Awful Answer’s liner notes, “the rhetorical reproduction of Whiteness” in the media by manipulating and distorting the words of right-wing pundits. Woods, a long-time frequenter of the Milwaukee noise and post-punk music scene, describes Awful Answers as a sort of companion to his previous album Simple Questions (2022). If the routine soundscape of daily modern life is passivity and automation-cars passing by and mindlessly computer keys tapping data into spreadsheets- Awful Answers is an aggressive disruption to daily life, and such aesthetic disturbance pays off by giving listeners a smart, timely commentary on how the mainstream media mimic certain racist dynamics of power. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |