Especially Likely Sloth — But What If He'll What Ant

Funny music... not the 'humour in music' discussion; humour is way more subtle than straight up nuttiness. Dangerous ground successfully trodden particularly in the 60's when the recording possibities and technology were booming and an incentive to experiment. Jean Jacques Perrey, Gershon Kingsley, André Popp, Juan Garcia Esquivel and Raymond Scott who combined inventiveness with an incredible patience and hilarious endresults.

Today's technology makes a lot of things easier (harddisc-editing and sampling, they're less labour-intensive then say, tapesplicing) and the charm of things being old is of course missed in contemporary attempts at making 'silly' music. Somehow the new technology is intrinsically less funny than the analog synths and tapemanipulations of the days of old as some of the more serious, mainstream music from those days to our ears seems funny (it probably did back then). Jason Walton (Agalloch, Nothing) tries in his project Especially Likely Sloth.

Jason, a.k.a. JWW, claims to be possessed by an eight-year old mentally handicapped child named Chriss Cobb who reformed hell into something really scary in a world already gone to hell. The way a lot of people react to 'funny' music surely serves this point. Somehow people don't see humour as a genuine, valid emotion and art should be about pain, hurt and sadness to be credible. ELS sounds insane: a vortex of niftily arranged samples and electronic instruments and hysterically highpitched vocals singing absurd lyrics. Sometimes a familiar sample or melody passes by but often mutilated enough to make it hard to remember what it was. Thoughts while listening are the first album by Mr. Bungle and the funnier sounds of The Residents but those are mere references in your brain that's getting all mushy exposed to the sounds of ELS.

I'm still not sure what to think of it. It's absurd, hysteric and 'different', but I have to be in the mood for this: it can work at one point, but completely fail another moment. There's enough hard work in it and it surely intrigues. It's certainly not for people who think music is serious business. I give 3 kudo's that represent an average: it can swing to 4 put also to 2, depending on timing. The cliché'd and all too obvious 'check out for yourself' credo seems in place here and Vendlus Records offers 2 full tracks and and a overviewcollage for that purpose.