Papiercuts, Richard / A Sudden Shift

Pena

formats available

LP
$12.25
PR 01
Street Date:
February 7th, 2012
Ship Date:
February 6th, 2012

RICHARD PAPIERCUTS’ CV includes somber musique concrete and noise experiments for Azul Discografica, collaborations with MATTIN (including 2011's Exquisite Corpse LP), a long spell as action drummer in a Slavic NYC psych trio of some repute, and as LF RESTAURANT, 14 years as singer / songwriter / guitarist in THE CHINESE RESTAURANTS. With that slippery outfit, Papiercuts crafted two ignoble classics of 2010 in the S-S Records EPs "River of Shit" and "Summer Romance,” celebrated art-punk slabs that turned heads at WFMU, The Wire, and Maximum Rock 'N' Roll alike. As the blogosphere would put it, "fidelity-wise this is a major step up" from those Chinese Restaurants singles. A Sudden Shift took over a year to record, during stolen late night hours at a secret 24-track analog studio, deep inside a Harlem warehouse on the verge of demolition, with Richard overdubbing most of the tracks himself. How'd it turn out? A dense, throbbing art-rock/postpunk/singer-songwriter record, riddled with secrets, brimming with hooks—a bleak 'n' anguished New York song cycle shot through with oblique humor. A Sudden Shift is an opthalmology of rock history that connects the febrile dots between postplunk, legitimate UK pop, and the 20th Century "serious music" canon. References so obvious, yet so out of place, they make you doubt yourself: Robert Plant (solo), Cold Sun (twice), outsider folk garbage, Current 93, Tilt, The Velvets, Howlin' Wolf, the Coltrane Quartet, Songs From the Big Chair, Comus, The Idiot, Sand, and, as ever, Joy Division. Influences? No: References. Intertexts. But even at its most "conceptual," A Sudden Shift is an insistently tuneful, emotionally loaded song-cycle, deliberate and precise in its diction even if Dick's agenda isn't easy to figure. Clean and fucked up. Sweet and sour. A Sudden Shift sounds like no other record in recent memory.