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***Take some kids, burn off the rock'n'roll fantasy with oxalic acid, reduce the sex drive with American television, keep 'em upright with coat-hanger wire and then have a sniff around for that brown muck the world calls "art." What you're probably whiffin' is the new Wintermittens record, their first in ten years. Before going any further, the name-dropping: Wintermittens are Geoff Soule (F*ck, Fibulator), Rich Wells (aka Rick Weldon (Din Triptych, Gray Davis)), and filmmaker / varietal media wank Gibbs Chapman (WetGate). While its subject matter sometimes ponders the mathematical beauty of the physical world, Bed, Book, Camera, Towel is much more than the sound of strong bonds, weak attractions, and strings with loose ends. It is a treatise on everything, a universal theory, persuasively penned and set to music. Shambling, melancholy, and brimming with "sophistuhmacation," the trio's second full-length album serves up eleven slices of blurry, slurry hypnotica. With songs of the quintessential lonely highway, a certain languid poetic burble strewn with droll audio snippets, and two offbeat covers Bed, Book, Camera, Towel provides an enigmatic reverie in a world of hidden mics and two-way mirrors. One song sounds like Oxbow deliberately running into a vintage Cadillac driven by Donald Fagen. Another sounds like Rickie Lee Jones's autistic brother quietly daydreaming. Then someone makes fun of the French. Again. Jackie McLean frets over the dissected remains of Little Melonae. The film (recording) ends. You jump up, almost kill yourself putting on your slippers and run down the stairs and around the corner. You see an old utility vehicle leave the lot. You run toward it but it's too late. |
