Towers of Power
Red Eyes | 12/02/2006
(3 out of 5 stars)
"Not everyone takes to Tackhead and their related acts, it's true-- some find their music to be overly mired in late 80's muso /electro fusion. Some find their industrial noise collision paranoia funk to be contrived at times. Others can't bear Gary Clail's voice, and wonder at its appeal.
But one thing is for sure -- when Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald and K Le Blanc get it right, they REALLY get it right and burn with a visceral -- yet so cerebral -- intensity. Hard to beat.
Last year saw the release of ONU Sound Crash, compiling AMS's reggae and dub career into a seamless collage. It had its moments for sure, but it was largely a sampler for the uninitiated and curious.
This Tackhead collage is quite a different proposition: it takes the original 80's work, mercilessly cutting off any loose fat and dated electro aspects, rendering the monolithic sonics lean -- raw funk power and cathartic intellect focussed through a prism of sheer noise.
The album opens with Oppenheimer's quote from Hindu Scripture -- By July 1945, USA was ready to test its A bomb. Recalling his contemplation on the awe of the event, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from Hindu Scripture, the "Bhagavad-Gita" -- Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi armed form and says: 'I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
Oppenheimer went to Harvard where a classmate says he "intellectually looted the place." The same could be said of Tackhead and their approach to sound. The album takes in a mangled tape of Martin Luther King, quoting and meditating on lines from HG Wells, cut and spliced with the whoosh and shatter of a car crash. Later, Le Blanc's austerely disciplined snares become entwined with the Psalms and supplications of Trappist monks. In the track "Heaven On Earth", near death experience survivors recount their euphoria -- ( "I heard a loud buzzing noise -- I felt myself moving backwards, through a long dark tunnel --") before having the life energy squeezed out of their optimism by a preacher's sermon, redolent of Schopenhauer at his most reductive and claustrophobic. The chant is steadily cut down and reduced until it resembles a Zulu chant.
This is Manichean funk at its most extreme: The Manichean sect (begun in Persia, circa 200 AD) apparently thought matter itself was evil, and that consciousness was a kind of punishment, the only solution being the liberation of the spirit from its earthly/bodily cage.
At their heights, this is what Tackhead seem to be doing with their music -- Liberating the body/spirit duality from its constrictions.
Tackhead music is colossal funk abiogenesis-- heuristic noise exploration at its extreme limits.
Highly recommended austerity and funk asceticism, from start to finish.
Unmissable. Hard to beat. Towers of power from Tackhead."
Tack...head
Lovblad | Geneva, Switzerland | 03/22/2007
(3 out of 5 stars)
"Tackhead were a formidable group but all their members were able to do better things separately. The playing is great as usual but somehow it is too sterile and cerebral. They were doing a mix of hip hop hard rock and electronica before anyone but there was something too cold in their rhetoric to actually be engaging. Still, from a purely critical point of view, very good and essential."
Track Listings (29) - Disc #1