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Rating: Psychedelic soot.
This could be the key to interpreting the new album by the three scattered post-modern music geniuses.
Electronic flickers of contagious beats disorient and unsettle, an inspired spoken word, at times, is abruptly severed by a beautiful pop vocal melody, but directed with ingenious and strategic eccentricity.
Elsewhere, an organ score is inverted and filtered, paced to lead to an epileptic and generally cerebral dance.
"Ten" offers, throughout the tracklist, small lo-fi symphonies that sway from graced and cursed hip-hop to American indie rock, from certain experimental pop (take, for example, Radiohead's Amnesiac) to devilish and creative ambient electronica worthy of the Warp catalog, particularly Boards of Canada.
Here, the equation sound=space sharpens with each listen. Something silences, cauterizes the upheavals for a moment, and rings sweetly, almost whispering, voices of drug-devoted aliens.
"Ten" is nothing more than the patient to whom cLOUDDEAD (yes, spelled just like that!!!), self-taught surgeons, promise care and devotion as close as possible to the ineffable. And so, just a little patience is required as the hallucinogenic pastiche suddenly gives way to a caress. An indispensable caress with the scent of violets. "Dead dogs two" is an uncontrollable round of digital dance and irresistibly catchy in the refrain (which almost inexplicably recalls the latest Yuppie Flu, but with more instinct).
But in the alluring cLOUDDEAD amusement park, there is also, never enough honestly, cinematic influences and sonic grains from Angelo Badalamenti (listen to "Rymers’s only room"), now rightfully among the most influential composers for musicians who approach certain specific atmospheres. And so, from the psychedelic diamond (“Son of a gun”) blooms an involuntary(?) homage to the darkest new wave in electronic sauce (“The velvet ant”); from multifaceted and less conventional Hip Hop (“Rifle eyes”) emerges a nursery rhyme of modern psychedelia (“Physics of Unicycle”) that fries in the warm spring air.
cLOUDDEAD enjoy radiant grace: they kill any model and category without leaving a trace and/or reference of their passage. They achieve the feat of being trend-killing serial killers while appearing enviably trendy. Fashion-wise. Thus, there are no words that can even remotely capture the clarity and reliability in describing this reservoir of ideas and concentration of madness (understood as artistic courage), but one thing is clear to me. This is a magnificent album (the first, and alas their last, great of the new year). One to lose sleep and one's mind over. And the fact that it is a crafted production (like gelato) makes it preferable without hesitation to certain exclusively mercantile artifices.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Pop Song (05:47)
It's the wood man and his splintering self.
It's the wooden woman and her hollowing out
Sickly Micky Mouse.
Skinny Minnie Mouse.
Elvis, what happened ?
Pop Sickle note: The lable stapled a speaker
to the back of a sheep's throat.
Tongue depressor with the width
With the width of a spatula
Supresses all syllables;
"blah blah blah", end quote.
Cotton cotton candy, Cotton cotton candy... spun any way you like it.
Elvis, what happened?
High school picture day in L.A.,
someone in the sky with diamonds.
And you go back to bed
with a dead dog in your head.
How can I be your lover
when you sport a head of rubber?
Sucker...
You can't take applause to bed with you.
I've got my own blood and a decent depression line.
And then we say "fuck" in our pop song.
06 Rifle Eyes (03:53)
a murder of mosquitos, and moths, and gnats
ravage the florescent flickering ribs of a motel lot flood light.
their frantic trajectories perfectly sketching insane in it's halogen corona.
no collision... no drinking of bulbs at long last...
just a paniced moon drove dance they bang their insect eyes and mind at in the dark.
note: it takes an extended stay
america's common black self cleaning line of ants
approximately 1&2/3rd's hours to completely excavate
the fresh kill carcas of a large new orleans cricket.
point: minnows have teeth in their throats
thrice we passed this truck all packed with pigs...
this truck is always packed with pigs.
you can not tell nor ask a pear tree
that it might only have the bird's nests happen to its branches.
have you ever marveled through the pretty pith of your turned around eye
at the bug blood gut modern art on the fender of your country crossing rental van?
it then becomes self evident
that nature is responsible...
to peel deer from desert fun...
to sleep through vulture mouths...
it's femur like a chopstick through the paper.
nightcrawlers all dried up on the summer sun sidewalk.
an ant with a little bit of leaf looks like an ant with an african mask.
the red raw salmon steak in the gas station urinal.
a full feathered dead pigeon with its entire skull exposed.
a single long stemmed rose resting between two mounted antlers.
a spider spitting web on a styrofoam snowman's head.
car salesmen asleep in their cars on lunch-break under the highway onramp.
the x-ray of someone's tumored skull left to scream doom from the gutter
with all the other preventative waste, no name no face.
all the oil drills on some sick sedated rhythmic robot.
rape mode like brain-washed flies at a carcass.
the highway shoulder dead dog's fly devoured eyeballs,
as garnish to a four lane state road.
and all the southern cali orange trucks headed to somewhere there's winter.
one armed men changing tires in the shoulder
for pretty ladies and their well dressed daughters;
engine oil boiling, undercarriage eaten by a billion ants of rust,
bacteria gang-banging in the window cracks.
a single long stemmed rose resting between two mounted antlers.
07 Dead Dogs Two (03:59)
From the height of the highway onramp
We saw two dogs, dead in a field
Glowing on the Oakland Coliseum
Green seats wasteland
Dogs, dogs we thought were dead
They rose up, rose up when whistled at
Their rib cage inflating
Like men on the beach being photographed
A guard dog, guard dog for what, for what
Against tofers ellis penniless athletic fanatics
Getting into games through a whole in the fence
For the owners of the blue tarp tent
Pitched by a creek, beneath an onramp
In the privacy of the last three
Skin and bony tree, devoid of leaves
And us undeceased and our new cd's
Dippin' on goodies, Oakland
(Chorus):
It's hard to stand the sight of
Two dogs dead under a sky so blue
You have to stop the blood to your head
To fit the breath in front of you
We secretly long to be some part of a car crash
Long to see your arms stripped off the tendons
The nudity of swelling exposed vein
Webbibg the back of your hand
To be a red-tendoned dog
To be red-tendoned dogs
Blood breathing by the side of the highway
I long to be dead
Center of a curious crowd
To be touched
Sticky, like nearly dried paint
Their soft silent stare nursing your face
Anticipating the slightest pinch I flinch of pain
Everyone blank in accident awe
As the car crash fiberglass dust
Straight up settles on your raw muscle tissue
(Chorus)
To be a red-tendoned dog
To be red-tendoned dogs
To be red-tendoned dogs
To be red-tendoned dogs
To be dead center of a curious crowd
Against my misery
I don't think I've seen my screeching pain
I can now feel what's around us
It is some sort of harmony
The harmony of overwhelming murder
09 Physics of a Unicycle (04:16)
orville and wilbur
cold cut
the anchor's from their ankles,
carving
propellers from whale fins
in the back of a bicycle shop...
and thus begins the tale
of the thumb trigger
cloud kill.
at last the wright's reinvented
the horse with wings,
another invention
only fit for a mannequin.
early time machine's
will have tended to leave you
left screaming
on a dinosaur's dish.
in da vinci's 'bike accident',
an outerspace whodunit?
monkeys play magellan
as the next ex-edison,
standing out
in the crowd
with a unicycle.
physics of a unicycle...
twice the remarkable.
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