Wood/Metal/Plastic/1537/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock

75 Dollar Bill Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock, 2016’s best LP; with a fair shot at 2017, 2018 and 2019’s crowns too.  Word up.  It is rare to stumble across an album so good, so unsung, so hard to write about; this must be take #7 at least for me.

Ah well, let’s drift downstream with them a little, after all I’m not trying to wake up.

Wood: there is an organic breathable quality about these grooves.  You know the way that wood is never a truly cold surface? that it will readily absorb and hold any warmth you give it? there is plenty of that here if you take flight with 75 Dollar Bill.

Metal: only present in the guitar strings worried by Che Chen*.  There’s a remarkable durability and a clarity of tone here when he makes those strings sing, limber, longer and linger.  Nothing he plays here has been played before, think on that, pilgrim.

Plastic: Rick Brown’s instrument of choice veers between a plywood, or a plastic crate.  There may be deep intent there, a comment on transient commerce being bent into art, the accessibility of it all, or just the irony of NY street detritus being co-opted into the production of music that evokes the lone and the level sands stretching far away.

Pattern: definitely distinct from rhythm.  The front cover is a visual representation of their music.  I get that, we are not talking about beats and bars – more streets and stars.  The patterns here give us beautiful lop-sided grooves like ‘I’m Not Trying To Wake Up’, every desert sand, every empty street; the music chasing the horizon, snaking fast towards it, licking at that glow.  Patterns.

Rhythm: definitely distinct from pattern.  Every track has a tempo, pitched roughly at the pace of a limping Bactrian.  Listen past the plucks, honks and intricately patterned drones, there are hidden rhythms here; underplayed, understated, perfectly pitched for a human heartbeat and who can resist that?

Rock: huge great outcrops of the stuff, towering out of the sands we envisage ourselves crossing to the sound of this music.  Enduring, stoic, vasty-y but not very fast-y.  You can hear every substrata.

 

Four tracks, one biggy one per side; all distinct, all excellent.  How can music from New York sound so much like desert music? I hear all sorts of primal desert blues and deep, dark roots music in Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock.  This is world music in the best sense of that term, music spun from all over the world, like mental floss.

75 Dollar Bill’s make modal music, with an uniquely Arabic air, there is just something about the tones, the descending spirals of notes places this outside the more commonly heard African desert blues.  Guitarist Che Chen studied Moorish music in Mauritania and there is definitely a taste of downtown Nouakchott hereabouts.

My favourite track here, tonight at least, is ‘Cummins Falls’ a tumbling shuffle of insistent grungey blues guitar which could be straight out of Junior Kimbrough’s travels/travails.  There’s an oily, sumpy, carburettor quality to it that stops anything here getting too arty, too polite, too rarefied.

 

Elsewhere on the likes of ‘Earth Saw’ there is a touch of something only-barely-tamed reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in their early unpredictable prime.  Post rock? post fucking everything more like! I cherish the way 75 Dollar Bill do not follow anyone else’s template, defiantly entrancingly so.

I simply can’t recommend this one enough.  Desert music for a ravaged climate, ‘soon all will be dessert – tent music for tent people’ as the band would have it**.

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I rather like the insert/manifesto/raving nonsense thing too.  I am rather partial to shaking my infinite maracas and not enough instrumental music carries manifestos in my view.

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984 Down.

PS: From last year’s LP, not this, but this will do here for another 4 years until I get around to reviewing that one:

*that’s a lie, at various points hereabouts friends add trumpet and saxophone to great effect.

**dessert, not desert. I checked. Twice.