Opposite of all Earthly things
Mr. A. Pomeroy | Wiltshire, England | 07/12/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I have always wanted to be the first person to write a review of Arab on Radar's "Soak the Saddle". Now is my chance. He who controls the present, controls the future, because people in the future will assume that my opinion was representative of all men circa 2008. The people of the future will write a history of 2008 based on my blueprint, and as a consequence of this future historians will assume that I was the dominant mind of the early part of the twenty-first century. A hundred years from now people will look back at the past, and they will see me.
I was turned onto Arab on Radar by internet guru Mark Prindle, whose review of "Soak the Saddle" is very funny and predates my own. Sadly for Mark, it will be lost in time, whereas my review will live forever, because it is on Amazon.com. This is the long tail in action.
Still, I digress. "Soak the Saddle" is really more of an EP than an album, because it has nine songs that are mostly two minutes long. The band has a very distinctive style that reminds me of Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica". In fact, the songs on "Soak the Saddle" sound like one-second snippets from "Trout Mask Replica" looped over and over again, as if the record had stuck. The drumming in particular sounds as if it is looped, because the drummer plays a single short phrase over and over again, with hardly any fills. It reminded me of Talking Head's "Remain in Light" in this respect, because it is based around short loops, except that whereas "Remain in Light" was bouncy and melodic, "Soak the Saddle" is deliberately abrasive. Track five has a nice swinging beat, but it's mostly pound-pound-pound. The music is driven by the pounding drums, and also two guitars which duel like scratchy, trebly, Bizarro-world versions of Mick Taylor and Keith Richards.
That's a powerful mental image. Imagine Mick Taylor and Keith Richards with paper bags over their heads, and they are terrified, but they cannot stop playing. From what I have read about the band, they used to have a bassist, but she left, and they didn't replace her, so the album sounds a bit like Public Image Limited's "Flowers of Romance", but even more offputting. Each song has one idea that repeats for a while and I find the repetition hypnotic.
Yes, think of it as a really trebly, parody version of Talking Head's "Remain in Light". It's a room-clearing party-stopping album but I like it. The songs don't go on too long, and each one has a new idea, and overall it's so deliberately wrong that it cheered me up.
There's a singer, too, although I can barely make out what he sings, except on track two, which is rude."
