by Troy Sherman
Walking dark outside pressure behind your eyes. Pressure building up behind your eyes. Air the same degree as skin or just slightly colder, and slides over it like dull knives peel fruit. Body bent but not for moving, not rigid or angular; body just a forward crumple like wet shirts over backs of chairs but moving faster. Building up is more than just pressure though, more than just behind your eyes: swelling outside you but what it is is tough to say, tough almost as... Dizzy would be if not for skin peeled like dull knife on fruit. Faster now though too. Air’s peeling, like some would say “Bite” — some would say, “Biting.” Eyes on ground till they’re up now faster. Hands tight balls like mud in pockets. Clenched there but some would say, “Sharp.” Eyes up and stop and see a… See a thing. Stop dead. Thing looks bigger than it should. Thing looks immune like it doesn’t feel the air. Some would say, “Biting.” Thing makes a low sound. Air goes grayscale. Bit less pressure now; static. Run.
This is what the song “Palm Sweat in the Air” sounds like, at least to me. It’s the third track on Guff in the Garden, the third full length from Massachusetts freakrock duo Fred Cracklin. In its nine tortured minutes it’s one of Guff’s best. It’s also the track that does most completely what I think is what this record does the best, something that seems especially rare and refreshing from a wordless dumpsterjazz hodgepodge of reworked demos and salvaged old ideas: Narrativity.
By this I mean to say that Guff in the Garden tells stories. Not in a Rock Opera kind of way — in fact Guff’s tales are totally subjective content-wise; all’s on the listener to come up with the plots — and neither are the songs exactly cinematic. Each track is more like a situation, actually, with all the strange stuff Max Goldstein (drums) and Adam Bosse (guitar) toss together swirling around miasmatically (though, to be clear, not aimlessly) for you to come wade through coughing and incorporate into your day’s dull manifold however you feel impelled to.
Take “Kill the Clones,” it starts off midway through a drumbeat, and then there’s this belching synth that keeps, well, belching through most of the track. It’s disorientingly tough to place, the synth — gross even, popping like swamp bubbles scant inches above the thick, irregular surface of a rhythm mired deep in not making up its own mind — so when the chug gives way to a quick mathy movement at the song’s midpoint, it almost feels like a break. The drums don’t find their way and the fizzing guitar just goads them, till it starts to seem like nothing is beyond the pale, not even that synth seeping back into the mix (which it does). The track (like most on Guff) is an amalgam of sounds so discrete and disjunctively weird that it’s only when you start listening to it as an aside (or at least as something willfully unserious) that it reveals itself to be up to something, even saying something. What it says, though, is a nonsingular factor of you, the listener, synthesizing that system of sounds, most likely unconsciously, into something approaching sensible; this headwork that Guff makes you do — this making-you-make-sense-of-it-by-making-it-linear, which it isn’t — is dizzying, and it’s what I mean when I say it’s narrative. (Note, if you give a shit, which you don’t necessarily have to, that some of this is sort of the opposite of how “experimental” music works when its makers are prouder of the epithet — Boulez wants your attention, Boredoms want your body. Fred C. just want to freak you out, and the thing is, that’s good.)
In “Kill the Clones” as with every song on Guff, all these homeless little sonic joys not only come together to form something oddly unified and whole (which of course is one mark of good improvisational music), but actually edge each other on to planes alone they’d leave aurally untapped (if you’ll forgive me the prose). Which is all just to say that, in rocking, Guff’s songs rock towards something you can sense like a plotline, albeit with the finesse of about eleven garbage trucks.
All my harping on “narrativity” could well be useless for really getting at the gist of Fred Cracklin’s music. Maybe it’s just the result of some vestigial romanticism buried deep in that usually-untapped chunk of my brain down near the spine that likes George Eliot and operas. Or it could stem from the mind-rotting dearth of stuff happening in my own life that makes me need to project half-baked horror plots onto the demos of some New England DIY band. Still, I think these songs do tell stories.
Like there’s the one “Well Hot Dignity” tells, which is sordid — really makes you feel dirty, like an outhouse fuck and stuff in your fingernails. Or the one about waking up dazed in a cold room with one window — it’s crawling with bugs and you’re stiffly alone and know you need to leave soon but can’t tell why — that “Thought It Forgot It” rattles off. “The Millennials Next Door” scrapes along the floor sputtering in little circles and talks about drugs it did once, eyes dull and distant, and “Hair Machine” is a page ripped from a book and then torn in half and crumpled, but with some stuff about mollusks still sorta legible. And of course there’s “Palm Sweat”’s, which is stilted and circular like being chased through the rain.
The only track that doesn’t spin a yarn is the closer, “Mouth Damn.” It’s six turgid minutes of sludged-out concrète for stoners, too aleatory and closed off to serve as fodder for much of anything but unsettled listening. It’s plain and grating and guileless and off, and it’s the perfect way to end the album.