Sun City GirlsPiano Bar + For Drummers Onlytwo long playing vinyl records in a wooden box with extrasOQ'EBAL 001 CAXÓN
OUT OF PRINT one of the many responses to the box: My thoughts on Piano Bar... After way too long in transit and a typically brazen customs & excise rip off, the Piano Bar box hit town on Friday morning. My mother stayed home from work all day to receive it, but when I got back from work, my heart aflame with expectation, she wore a tenseexpression, for it had not yet arrived. My excitement mutated into andemonic fury. I picked up the phone with vituperous tongue and went through the entire parcel force options menu in order to find a hapless human that I could abuse, but all there I could find were automated fucking voices. Ispewed and cursed manya delivery man with variations on unthinkably gory demise. I was hatred personified. I gave up in the end, apoplectic. WHERE'S MY FUCKING PIANO BAR??? Just then a neighbour appeared at our door. Clutching a large parcel. The penny dropped. My beloved box set had been left in his care by the delivery man after our own doorbell had received no response. It clicked: my mother's poor hearing (selective deafness IMO)had turned Parcel Force away. She'd probably been vacuuming or something. Tried to con me with the 'doorbell's on the blink' argument, which I soundly disproved with a fire and brimstone righteousness. My ire was successfully transplanted onto her. Thank God I hadn't managed to speak to anyone on the phone. (By the way, I don't live with my mother, it's just a temporary arrangement until I can fund my next and final leap abroad). Nevertheless, that frown turned upside down when I done rescued that baby from it's cardboard box. And I shed tears of blood when eyes fell upon that holy masterpiece. The scent of it hit me first; that of fresh paint. Itwas an olefactory overload that paralysed me. I was so taken by the craftsmanship that I forgot to open the box for a minute, but what followed thereupon is predictable enough and engaged every one one of my senses, for even taste was satisfied by the taste of satisfaction. The next few minutes passed like an dream, and even now I look back to me proudly showing my mother a series of coloured Sun City Girls condoms with a hint of incredulity. I think my last words on the matter were "oh yeah, there're a couple of records as well". "Familiar but fresh" - my three words for Piano Bar. This album encompasses everything I love about the Girls, except for their occasional mischievious tendency to throw out a bad album. Nowhere more localised is this than their hifi rendering of one of Alvarius B's finest: Great Fuck Inaccessible, replete with its repulsive yet compelling imagery like '(he) sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia' - THAT's the stuff fellahs!!! If you ran the Carnival Folklore Resurrection CDs through a CD player with a qualitative peak detection device then you'd probably end up with a collection of tracks much like this. I listened to the whole thing before bed and discovered in the morning that I'd had nothing left to dream about by the end of it. When I awoke I put on For Drummers Only and found my personal myth of the unlistenable drum solo album in tatters by the time the needle had finished its work. I don't know how they do it. It's as though they say '"let's make a drum solo album" and just do it without having to consider HOW one goes about doing it without producing a wanky work of pure self indulgence. Gocher's signature is so clear in places that I can actually see him at work. I suppose this is the closest thing we have at the moment to a new solo album from the man. AB is on characteristic chameleonic form as well. Is there anything he can't turn his hand to??? Right now I'm figuring out where I'm going to put all my stuff, because there's not enough space in my room for possessions AND this box set. Everything else is clutter. Other CD and vinyl box sets will just have to go on Ebay, cuz my standards have been raised to a hitherto unimaginable new level. The question that plagues me still is how Ri Be Xibalba managed to let this go at the affordable price of $200. But I'll give it no further thought, cuz I need to dispell this clenched excitement by road teasting some of them prophylactics. With the Piano Bar box set Ri Be Xibalba has left the highest possible creative watermark short of deluge level. Currently my doors of perception are jammed with an unstoppable flurry of mixed emotions. I don't suppose I'll see another musical artefact so beautifully rendered in all my life, but that's fine, cuz I don't think I'll get bored of looking at this one. At last someone has appeared who can do the Sun City Girls justice! Cheers!Stuart |
FOR DRUMMERS ONLY
Holy halos the music in the piano bar box is freakin incredible. had me a little celebration for my book bein done on saturday and cranked out all piano bar items - drinking beer from the shotgun shell with a cocktail demon's legs sticking in the fiery foam is one of those never--forgettable images, and we slapped on the drumming LP first - some un/ ultragodly material in there. then flipped on over to the piano bar LP and had our souls thoroughly dislodged. much appreciamo. the box itself was quite incredible - and the music somehow still surpasses it all!reaction from The Unwrinkled Ear |
