| Tracklist: |
01 Wild-Eyed Hounds 02 Thirsty Girl, or, the Tale of
the Storm Crow 03 Hammer, Anvil and Stirrups 04 The Early Years of
Dr. Lindsay 05 Lizard Tree On Fire 06 The Glorious Immolation of the
Holy Order of the Sun 07 Dog vs. Postman, in B 08 St. Nick's Sugar
Hill Sanitorium (What do you reckon, Julia?) 09 Concerning two lunatic
Vagabonds of the Middle Ages 10 Commercial Success 11 Marvelous
Murderess |
| Info: |
The Deadfly Ensemble returns with their third album, a kid-gloved
punch-up between artsy post-punk and off-kilter chamber-folk and their
most frenetic offering to date, replete with cinematic arias,
tomahawk-wielding war-marches and dreamy, synth-laden
vignettes.
Deadfly vocalist and songwriter Lucas Lanthier has
already proven himself to be a renaissance man. Every album from his
previous band Cinema Strange, as well as the first two Deadfly Ensemble
albums, came well equipped with writings, videos, and artwork courtesy of
Mr. Lanthier himself. An Instructional Guide... keeps up the
tradition, furnishing fans with a richly textured album package that
includes a foldout poster with pages of the weirdly fantastic lyrics that
have made Lanthier's projects famous AND a limited edition insert signed
by the entire band! The music on An Instructional Guide... recalls some of
the bombast and energy of his earlier Cinema Strange works, moving The
Deadfly Ensemble into a new phase of snarling literary art-rock
mischief. They can still include themselves amongst a lineage of
Weimar-era nightlife and even vaudevillian jazz performers, but the
artistic developments are Dada chaos and sardonic brain teasers. Imagine
that David Tibet took the Current 93 crew into a tunnel of love boat ride
maintained, decorated and administered by the Virgin Prunes, and when they
emerged they holed up in a New England lighthouse until an album was born
from their quivering loins. And what the hell, the lighthouse was
haunted...
With five members, this is the fullest version of the
band to appear on record to date, providing a level of expression that
their compositional sensibilities seem to revel in. The conflux of erratic
musicians that form the Ensemble have wrought an album with some of the
elaborate strangeness of Kate Bush and Sparks, but with liberal and
conspicuous appointments from the topsy-turvy post-punk universe. The folk
sensibility of the first two records persists, but if "folk" is the
Shirley Collins in the equation, she has been kidnapped by a renegade
electric chamber orchestra, had her dainties crammed into leather and
stilettos and given LSD to help ease her into her new world of coked-up
rodeo clowns and dockside bars. Sort of like a lost episode of "The
Prisoner." |