Thinking Fellers Union Local #282
Mother Of All Saints

The Thinking Fellers hail from San Francisco and are the craziest experimental freaks of the '90s. Mother Of All Saints is a monstrous double LP overflowing with bizarre sounds, atomic missiles, sugary choruses, and a lot, a lot of nonsensical noise. The entire history of rock is hacked away, sandblasted, shattered, and canned into 23 small, dizzying sound gems. Sonic Youth, Residents, a bit of KrautRock, Frank Zappa, and the Beatles (!) are the main ingredients of the Fellers-Sound.
Their music does not convey emotions, create an atmosphere, is not ass-kicking rock, and is not danceable. Basically, there is no reason to play this album on your stereo. Yet, it has charm; it emanates a sort of dull brilliance, a repellent charisma that ensnares you.

Seventy minutes for twenty-three songs.
More than songs, I would call them surreal sketches, frenzied shards. Take a gigantic mirror whose reflective surface contains all the music of the last 40 years, and make the unfortunate gesture of violently smashing it to the ground. There you have the incomplete fragments that make up Mother Of All Saints (along with seven years of bad luck!).
I'll be honest with you, listening to it is no easy task; you need to arm yourself with patience and curiosity and dedicate yourself completely, at least for 70 minutes. It is not the kind of music you can use as background for reading or doing something else: it demands your attention. And it NEVER rewards you! Instead, you must continually forgive its excesses, its off-key moments, its less successful numbers.
Among unbearable feedbacks, machine gun bursts, concrete noises, background voices, and chilling detunings, sometimes emerge damn catchy pop choruses, sublime guitar arpeggios, or even hard-rock riffs that scrape the skin. And it all has such an unfinished, sketchy appearance!
I describe a random track to give a bit of an idea.

Hummingbird in a Cube of Ice (what a title!): at the beginning some noise that could come from a guitar as well as from a tank, pause. More noise for a few seconds then, among echoes and reverberations, the drums propel a sort of stumbling funk (Pop Group? Minutemen?); Sonic Youth-like guitar strums introduce the Residents with blaring in the background and as an interlude a bit of healthy heavy metal tribalism, what the hell!