Mark Kirby (Associate Writer for Music Dish)
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The Return of Maximal Weird or Retro finds a Gem under a Pet Rock
The Prime Time Community Orchestra presents Songs That Will Never Win a Grammy-------------------------------------------------------
"In the future, there will be one music." - Duke Ellington -------------------
"Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny." - Frank Zappa--------------------
Upon listening to the music of the Prime Time Sublime Community Orchestra, you realize that the future is here, even if the music industry and the attendant consumer culture it caters to don't realize it. If you're reading this article, you are ready for the future now. Once you hear this music, whether totally straight or in a way-out altered state, you'll realize that jazz can also smell pungent and fertile, satisfying and fresh. Zappa was right and Ellington was right, but neither could have predicted that their modern acolytes are a group of musicians living in the wilds of New Jersey.----------------------
From the opening notes of the festival of angular melodies, "Curb Your God," to the ending tune, the aptly titled existential encore, "It Will Be Over Before You Know It," the listener is taken on an odyssey, whose path I scarcely remember having ever existed, since, like most Americans, our minds and memories are awash with media fed crap.-----------------------------
The "young rebel with something to say, man," frankly, doesn't exist so much anymore. Most young folks these days think that fashion = revolution. Thinking outside the box - as opposed to picking a box with prefab style/music/look/attitude as seen in magazines or MTV - is hard for kids nowadays, even if they're willing. This is the society of the spectacle and rebellion is fashion's life blood, sucked like a vampire as soon as it shows up. So, for something fresh and new, never trust anyone under forty. The leader and guiding light of this group, Paul Minotto, is from a time when music, especially rock, was supposed to be fresh and new, challenging the boundaries of what was known and accepted.----------------------
Most Americans, weaned on aggressive anti-intellectualism and L.C.D. (lowest common denominator) tastes are not even trying to hear, or understand music like the prime Time sublime Community Orchestra creates. But you can and you should. The record opens with "Curb Your God." The title says it all, especially with robot vocals warning about the dangers of gods on the loose, and "god-poo all over your head." A timely message, to be sure. The vocals - enhanced, robotic, sampled - sing a tune that to some may sound atonal or off key, but has beauty and logical form, embroidered by lush orchestration.----------------------
The next song, "I Want You," uses the same elements. A twisted love song, and one that will never get a Grammy, it starts with various bits of dialog, sounds, ads, space sounds, a scenario of madness and finally the sound of a car crash and an operator saying, in effect, "your girlfriend has left, and you can't find her." The rest of a song features a bizarrely processed voice singing: "The dandruff in your hair, the wrinkles in your dress, the holes in your underwear/ I want you, I really, really do . . . The absence of your teeth, the fatness of your ass, the smell of your dirty feet / I want you, yes I do."------------------------------
While freakishly absurd, these lyrics are closer to love's reality than anything on the radio in the last 15 years. Not everyone who is loved is a babe or loved for logical reasons. The music goes in and out of 12-tone, neoclassical textures, and Zappa meets Bonzo Dog Band music hall fare. Then a loping sax solo comes in over a space jam of sparse sounds. Weird, yet smooth and accessible. And above all, fiery and exciting, with a chorus you can sing along with. It could be a hit.-----------------------------------------
The social commentary in this record is something of a surprise, given that music this artfully conceived is usually lyrically more obscure. "Betty Poptarts" uses processed snippets from recordings of evangelists, commercials, the Bushies, and others to comment on people using politics, consumerism, twisted religion, or, as illustrated in a brilliant piece of dialog between a demanding woman and her browbeaten spouse, a romantic power struggle to fill the void and give life meaning.--------------------------------
Backgrounds and source materials are shown best in the studio/live epic "Just Do Me Tonight." This mini musical is based on the scenario of a lonely man at a bar, with few friends, and loveless, who scores with a busty blonde from Brooklyn. It starts with a long, slow build of textures and moody, asymmetrical, melody fragments, that transforms as though in a dream, to lizard lounge fantasy of jazz, followed by languorous, dream-frags of free jazz and texture-based music and surreal images, like a drunk on acid. It ends with an insane sexual fantasy romp.--------------------------
The amalgam of interesting music on this "Songs That Will Never Win A Grammy" is almost too much to adequately summerize or describe. The lush variety of sounds and textures is the music equivalent of one of those Indian Bollywood musicals one sees in certain Indian restaurants or on international TV channels, mixed with Warner Bros. cartoons, and Sun Ra. Well . . . maybe not. I don't know. I just know that this record takes you on a journey and, at just under an hour, like a good movie, is over before you know it.------------------------------------------------
And with regard to the title of the record: considering that a group called Todo won with a song about pot head actress Rosanna Arquette, and The Soggy Bottom Boys won for the "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, the primeTime sublime Community Orchestra should never say never.
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