Aranos — Banished In Spattered Relish
Shooting Toadstools on Shinoliazu Plain opens the album in a very Nurse with wound style with warped sound effects, creepy voices and distorted piano. The production immediately strikes you as a step up from And soon coffin sings and this benefit’s the more complex composition. Umpteen moments of Mildew Pleasure follows on with more straight forward piano playing interspersed with groaning hiccupping female noises. It doesn’t take long for Aranos to pick up his violin and begin pouring his trademark Gypsy folk freakout all over the shop.
His playing is as always intriguing but after so many records in a short space of time it leaves you asking whether he has another gear to slip into. His playing sometimes feels a bit forced among the surreal sound effects and production tricks, but here things seem more settled than on previous efforts.
Inhaling Carpet is the first of the songs here with Aranos stretching his vocal muscles. He flits from narrative/singing, to a choral droning style continuously while minimal piano and extended violin tones swell and dip. On Her Potency Pillow is an example of another Aranos trademark, his drawn out droning violin chords and plucks setting a foundation for electronic loopery and jiggery pokery. Steve Stapleton he is not, but some of the Nurse with wound main mans composition style and ability for finding patterns in disparate elements of sound have seemed to have worn off on Aranos. Bells, thumping bass throbs and springing loops enter and leave over the tracks seven minute duration.
Impending Passion Blast acts as a short intermezzo featuring a distant female soprano before entering into Interviews With The Almighty Yayu. This is thirteen minutes of almost monotonous bass drone with seemingly no change over it’s duration. This sadly harks back to the worst aspects of And soon coffin sings. Worldliness Pales Hereabouts is a slow ballad like vocal track with Aranos weaving an agonising vaudeville like tale of excess and surreal experience. As always his vocals are a love them or hate them affair but he does nothing new here to change anyone’s preconceptions. This penultimate track runs directly into the final offering When Sheep Reached Their Million which is fourteen minutes of fast semi-atonal violin bowing.
He does what he does very well, there is no denying that, but when he’s doing it at a rate of four records a year it does begin to wear a little thin. Fans will find much to appreciate if not to rejoice but there’s not a lot to entice new admirers.