The Red Crayola
Soldier Talk

 My middle school music teacher used to say that music is composed of 4 elements: melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre. Now: think about what happens when someone decides to assault not one, but all four of these elements simultaneously.
 
Mayo Thompson made history with experimental rock. He could have rested on his laurels after conceiving and creating that psychedelic apotheosis back in 1967, a year so distant it seems to come from another dimension, which took the name "Parable Of Arable Land." That record wasn't just a tribute to freak culture; it went beyond. That beyond was a new way of conceiving rock music; that way was the same (scientifically anarchic) one that would underlie the masterpieces of Faust, Chrome, Butthole Surfers, and Royal Trux: blocks of noise packaged and displaced at will with the (irreplaceable) aid of electronics and all the tricks available in the recording studio.

Mayo Thompson was not content with that avant-rock monument. He wanted to make his mark again a decade later, long after the summer of love hangover had ended, with people and their worldview forever changed, thus changing the world itself. It's incredible how a 60s psychedelia Master managed to make a statement even when people like Pere Ubu were setting the coordinates for musical research in the rock field. "Soldier Talk," released in 1979, bears the same inspiration and especially the same innovative fervor as the second Ubu, those abstract and indefinable ones of "New Picnic Time" and "Art Of Walking," works contemporary to "Soldier Talk" and beyond: practically during that period, Red Krayola and Pere Ubu were one and the same, given the mutual exchange of musicians and ideas.

However, I remain of the opinion that "Soldier Talk" has been too easily labeled as a "Pere Ubu-like" record, when in reality there are some important differences with the aesthetic of David Thomas and his companions: Red Krayola had a much rougher sound, and the references of "Soldier Talk" often stray from the Ubu universe. It is indeed not difficult to perceive, in the twisted plots that characterize the eleven concise pieces of this album, references to the more unorthodox Canterbury (Soft Machine) and less soft (Henry Cow), as well as in "Letter-Bomb," a skewed ballet whipped by continuous changes in direction, where the rhythm is in perpetual adjustment, there emerge suggestions of more feverish progressive, from Van Der Graaf Generator to Gong, and the most brain-damaged new-wave (Devo). On the other hand, one cannot overlook the kinship with New York's no-wave, the radical wing of Mars and DNA when not Half Japanese.
But the main inspirer of the work remains only one: Donald Van Vliet, the one from the psychiatric session of Trout Mask Replica. Like Van Vliet's, Thompson's is also music hostile to any emotional catharsis, music fertile and teeming with ideas aimed (paradoxically) at expressing the most disconcerting feeling of barrenness, the sharp X-ray of a mind unable to relate "normally" to the outside world.

On the other hand, the analogies with the second phase of Pere Ubu are undeniable: "Discipline," all scratches and squeaks, torn between the pestering picketing of the guitar and David Thomas's relentless falsettos, recalls the incredible "Birdies," which would appear the following year on "Art Of Walking"; the same Thomas makes a psychotic cameo in the minimalist thriller of the title track, a conclave of voices in a state of delirium, a forest of manic elves akin to those that populated the surreal settings of "New Picnic Time;" "On The Brink" starts exactly like "Go" by Pere Ubu, but then veers into a forbidden cross between a parody of Talking Heads (and indeed Mayo Thompson's inimitable voice is a kind of David Byrne on acid) and a brilliant foreshadowing of what, a few years later, would be the sound of Steve Albini. Yes, him indeed. Not just noise-wavers like Levene and Howard among the inspirations for the Chicago genius, but also the "old hippie" Thompson. And this is not surprising, given that by '79 Thompson had already drained every lysergic sludge, arriving at a grim, harsh, detuned sound, straddling between Jeff Cotton, Thomas Herman, Arto Lindsay, and Robert Fripp, able to climb the most inhuman contortions as well as persist cruelly on the same note throughout the track. Never heard a nastier guitar than the one perforating "X," perhaps the most unpleasant riff I've ever heard: emerging from it is the most transfigured surf-rock ever, manna from heaven for the future author of "Colombian Necktie."

 But it doesn’t end there: the experimental streak of the album goes beyond Thompson's contribution. Here and there, free-form winds and keyboards burst in a gently annoying manner to estrange an atmosphere already heated on its own. But even more significant is the contribution of the rhythm section, capable of deftly dishing out irregular times, breaks, syncopations, unexpected pauses, unimaginable paths: the combination of a tangle of dissonant strings and a rollicking rhythm section brings "Soldier Talk" frighteningly close to Slint territory. "Uh, Knowledge Dance," with that guitar riff slapped from one side to the other, and "March No. 12," with those continuous landslides, wouldn’t look out of place on "Tweez," while the suspense evoked by the only reiterative chord of "An Opposition Spokesman" is the same as Don Aman.

Album of neurosis, inadequacy, bewilderment, the more comical the more disturbing (see the 80 seconds of nightmare cabaret of "March No. 14"), "Soldier Talk" had the merit of brilliantly pushing beyond the seemingly wide boundaries of new-wave, ending up in territories still not fully explored today.