Search - Gastr Del Sol :: Crookt Crakt Or Fly

Hey hey

03/24/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"harmoniously disfunctional. sort of like falling down and skinning your knee, and liking it."

They make work from smoke...

boeanthropist | Cambridge, MA | 04/28/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Back when this came out, it stood as the first clear evidence of Jim O'Rourke's success at turning himself into John Fahey in the manner of Mr. Borges' Pierre Menard turning himself into Cervantes, at a time when the Great John Fahey Revival was still but a twinkle in some anonymous grizzled music clerk's eye. The Fahey Revival, of course, toppled Washington D.C. and brought about the charge of the four horsemen of the apoocalpyse, just like Blue Joe Death warned in those inscrutable liner notes so many years ago, and Jim O'Rourke spent several million dollars across four thousand hours on an analyst's couch to get over his Fahey complex (if not his celebrated Fahey/Wu-Tang stylisms), only to then make two of the most brilliant pop albums of the waning 20th century, and David Grubbs ran away to Africa by proxy when the news hit that a dusty American journalist had just emerged from the basement of the archives of the Paris police with indisputable evidence that Jim Morrison really WAS dead... However, before history's lightning and folderol necessitated such ridiculous name-dropping, Gastr del Sol (please someone e-mail me if you know what the hell that name means in English) oozed their sophomore effort up through the floorcracks of an unsuspecting public, who (being good Americans) slipped in the blue-green mess of it, knocked themselves unconscious, and remembered nothing when they woke up. But the band clapped their hands and laughed and it set the course for the rest of their output (besides that unspeakably bad Table of the Elements abomination): Little snatches of oblique lyrical pithiness, brooding guitar/piano calisthenics performed on the same planet Eric Satie went to when he died, and dense, pesticidal clouds of noise (the other complex Jim O'Rourke seems to have gotten over on that long leather couch). It's beautiful, it's painful, it is its own man. "Work From Smoke" and "A Wedding in the Park" are especially perfect, and the whole thing sets up you up proper for the shimmer of the next one, "Mirror Repair.""

Capt beefheart del sol

10/11/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Captain Beefheart has a song called "My Head Is My Only House When It Rains." Compare this to: "Is it an Umbrella When It Rains?" Then the off kilter rhythms, guitar, weird lyrics... Hmm... Go gastr del sol!"