Dominique Leone — Abstract Expression

Is it strange that I can sit through a whole album of Merzbow’s wind tunnels without blinking, and yet halfway through Abstract Expression I was squirming as if I’d picked up a nasty case of scabies?

By listening to this disc, I have gone directly from complete ignorance of Dominique Leone’s music to grudging admiration without actually liking any of it. He’s like the home-fi / progressive-rock / alt-pop version of Survival Research Laboratories, those loonballs who create giant machines out of pieces of this and that which carom at each other in fiery deathmatches. He takes pieces of ten different songs—with six different melodies each—and forces them to inhabit the same song without regard for whether or not they’ll overturn each other’s furniture or kill each other’s pets.

It’s ambitious, sure, but it all seems less like a sign of the man’s creative fertility as it does sheer indecision. The most balanced tracks, like “I’m the Police” (stick that one on your next mix for a friend), are just quirky enough to be memorable, and melodic without being condescending. Most of the time—too much of the time—it’s just plain random, and ultimately unrewarding. After not even twenty minutes of jittery time signatures, arbitrary hooks and weirdly earnest lyrics I was chewing at the inside of my cheek.

It’s frustrating, too, because creating such music—hell, creating any music at all—takes real effort. I go easy on people who take the trouble to pick up a real instrument and make something halfway hummable, instead of shoving a mike at a speaker for 45 minutes. But self-indulgence takes many forms.  I remember Frank Zappa being like this during his most annoying jazz-inflected periods in the Seventies, when he recorded way too many albums of cloying smartass hipness which no one but the most ardent Zappa fans remember let alone listen to on a regular basis.

Here and there, though, there are flashes of real songwriting and performing genius. They should be nurtured. If Leone tamed the overgrown garden of his musical passions, pruned it down to the stuff that works and is worth listening to more than once more novelty value, he might really have something here. As it stands, he’s on the near end of the same shelf as folks like Jandek and Wesley Willis, who are far more interesting to read about than to actually listen to.

That said, there is a side of me that would love to hear Leone collaborate with the likes of The Boredoms. A record that willfully perverse might well be a classic.