by Niko Nygard (@hatsuneniko)
Still Life of Citrus and Slime is the debut album of CFM, the solo project of Charles Moothart. Some may recognize Moothart as a frequent collaborator with Ty Segall, and a mainstay in the west coast’s fuzzy-guitar-driven garage rock scene. For people familiar with Moothart’s previous output, Citrus and Slime is not exactly a surprising album: fuzz-drenched riffs abound and manic solos burst from static hazes on a regular basis. Of course, none of that’s necessarily a bad thing, you don’t play a certain type of music for as long as Moothart has without getting pretty good at it after all.
What’s more interesting is listening to Moothart develop his own voice, separate from that of his peers with whom he’s probably always going to be linked. Citrus and Slime was written fairly quickly-over the course of two months-and the result is a relative sprawl of different ideas within the same framework. There’s a certain degree of playfulness to it all, with Moothart leaping from idea to idea so quickly that sometimes that he doesn’t even allow a song to finish before beginning the next one. There are slow builders, frenzied riffs, and even a musical quotation from The Beatles tossed in for good measure; and, of course, the whole thing is awash in psychedelic fuzz.
Taken as a whole, Still Life of Citrus of Slime is more a series of bullet points than a fully-realized essay. Much like a still life itself, the album presents images and ideas without necessarily fleshing them out all the way, and while this may sound like a negative, I don’t mean it as such. Rather, the unbridled creative stream of different musical concepts is an exciting insight into what may be coming should Moothart continue his solo career. After listening to Citrus and Slime it’s difficult to tell where Moothart may decide to take his sound, but if there’s one thing we can count on it’s that it will assuredly be interesting. And fuzzy.