Humpty Dumpty
The Washing Line

THE REVIEW

The debut of Humpty Dumpty is quite a heterogeneous stew of amateurly recorded material between 1995 and 2000 with a 4-track used at the bare minimum of its possibilities. 77 minutes (the maximum capacity of an audio CD at the time, in defiance of all common sense) for 36 sound testimonies of a psyche loosely held together by an intense taste for Barrett-like psychedelic songwriting and by a frenzied formal carelessness.

Obsessively molded within the limits of a conciseness that only exposes the melodic and significant core of each song, "The Washing Line" is an explosion of scratched colors, of neurotic rustles, of melody/weeds. A sort of best of from an intensely productive period that opens after our protagonist's controversial expulsion from Maisie and coincides with the formation of the group of the same name (The Washing Line) with David Gifted, from whose sole demo and the drafts of the second some episodes present here are drawn.

It is extremely difficult to associate in a review a consistent stylistic number to the enormous amount of material amassed here, and few -one might wager- will attempt it. Suffice it to say that Humpty Dumpty's is a universe disfigured by effects, affected voices, baroque overdubs, unconventional instruments (an unlikely tuning fork solo appears in "Jumps Out Of Time"), streams of consciousness tried and retried a hundred times.

The impression of a collection of first takes, initially so strong, will eventually appear premature with repeated listens: there are no fillers or empty passages in this vicinity: each piece, despite its unsustainable motivational anarchism, supports the next one, and all together justify and invoke a highly rewarding and original listening experience.