26 March 2012

frog a mungus 'velour' cassette



1995 shining moment for these guys (and, at that time, gals). th three places on th interwebs that mention 'em these daze make a big stink aboot their shoegazerness, but i sure don't remember 'em that way. anyhow this tape has lotsa splatty guitar lines all over but i wouldn't call 'em sonic-youthy (certainly not in th way that say, th neon blud tape is sonic-youthy, anyhow) and tho' there's some judicious use of stompbox delay on some of th vox (thx to billy h., producer/engineer extraordinaire), th singing is pretty straighforward. i'd go as far as a very ruff velocity girl comparison in that department, but even that's reaching and anyhow v.g. were shoegazey for only about 2.5 minutes anyhow ("my forgotten favorite"=alltime jam, tho'!). so to oversimplify, end-result-wise, f.a.m. were dancing around swivelarm battlegrip and kill sybil territory more than anything else (tho' in reading th lyrics mebbe a better uncomfortable pairing would be copper and samuel - plus bonus local wanna-be's spyglass [don't worry i've got that tape cued up]) but coming from a completely different perspective than those bands - which is probably best-evidenced by th trajectory that these folks took musically after th 'mungus ceased to be; even if you just follow th rhythm section you come up with th cherubs-meet-linda-blair-isms of subdevil and th what-if-fu-manchu-really-were-funny tack of their current project (with bogtrodder/acid blacker/limb trialer mike sliclen) chomp-chomp. which is to hint that all musical comparisons are largely for descriptive purposes only as th frog a mungus contingent were then and are now expressly about conjuring whatever they can/whatever tickles their fancy out of their personal musical ether - influences and contemporaries be damned.

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