This is a very special
Marble Stature post, as I am not writing from Fox Point, but rather from the
Park Slope area of Brooklyn. I rolled in a little too late to do anything last night, but woke up on the good side of the couch watched an old episode of “A Pup Named Scooby Doo,” and I’ll be off to class in a little bit. I’m going to go ahead and wish you Happy Halloween a few days early, because I think that the annual
Huron Keg Race (drink ‘til your done!) is happening this weekend in
Washington Beach, Ohio, and for me, that is the true indicator of Halloween weekend.
Psychedelic Horseshit The Anticoncept (Self Released, 2006)
Columbus, Ohio’s Psychedelic Horseshit are an interesting band; they played a show (I think it was one of their first, if not the first show) at
Cafe Bourbon Street last New Year’s Eve with
Night of Pleasure, and
Times New Viking and then within a couple of months they already had a couple of cdr EP’s for sale at their shows and on the
Columbus Discount website. Over the course of this past year they have put out a total of five of these “paper singles,” a fantastic seven-inch called
Who Let the Dogs Out? on Columbus Discount, and are now working on their debut full-length to be released on
Siltbreeze next year. I’d say- that’s quite a year! It’s a shame that these “paper singles” are now all out of print, because they are all great in their own way… and eventually I’ll have some reviews up for all of them. They all have really nice collaged artwork that’ve been color copied, folded and stapled on the sides, as to make a folder for the cdr. Simple enough, yes, but there’s something really nice about these little artifacts.
The first one that I got was their (somewhat) breakthrough release
Blown Speaker Standards, and I was pretty impressed by it (especially the anthemic opener, “Not Since Now”) and picked up a copy of the two which preceded it:
King Tubby’s Baddness Dub, and
The Anticoncept. Out of the three, I thought that
The Anticoncept was the pick of the punk litter… opening with “Punk Tree,” a (somewhat) typical mode of Horseshit as singer
Matt Whitehurst’s cocaine-addled
Dylan-meets-
E. Smith stream-of-conscious riddim raps atop simple street-side musicianship. But it’s
The Anticoncept’s two other songs that really stand out across their EP’s. Soft and almost lilting; “Nothing to Do” sounds like one of those great down-tempo heart-tuggers off of
Slanted and Enchanted, driven by
Rich Johnston’s sloppy drumbeat, and washes of guitar, casio and bass slugging along until their brilliantly un-climactic union at the end. On the final song of the three, “Dead Horse,” they slow things down even more; even resembling a ballad, with pretty keyboards, soft drumming,
Jason Roxas’ melodic bass-playing, and a ton of atonal saxophone skronk upsetting the mix just enough to charge the piece with unforgettable moments of beauty and catastrophe. Good luck trying to find a copy of
The Anticoncept (or any of their other stuff, for that matter), but here’s to hoping that down the road somebody puts together all of this great material for the people who weren’t lucky enough to grab a hold of them the brief time that they were around.
