Life on this planet, at its best, makes very little sense, and if you desire to continue to move through it, you’d better learn to walk in a state of perpetual dizziness. Thoughts of moving to some island and readjusting your psyche by meditating every morning and making tea out of some mushroom that only survives in deep caves, is a fairytale.
Get the most enlightened Buddha in a traffic jam, and they’ll start cussing like a sailor. Get the President of the Free World to sit in line during a food shortage, and they’ll beg on their hands and knees. And, get yourself a good whiff of this world on a lonely afternoon, and you’ll never be able to whistle in tune again.
It’s all funny, heartbreaking, and might make sense if you rearrange all the pieces like you were three-years old again. Anomaly Report’s excellent “Beautiful Terrible Things” album is a psychedelic alt-rock investigation into how pieces of reality can be taken apart and refit back together. It’s a funny, eerie series of songs where the eccentricities are balanced nicely, when necessary, with straight, muscular rock music.
Just listen to the opening track, “There’s a Snake in the Barn,” where the vocals sound almost like some ancient blues curse, while the instruments tumble around it like they’re trying to invent some new musical scale, one scarier than all of the ones they make jazz players study in school.
Tension’s the game of the game on this record, and on “Wicked,” it’s all the notes that Anomaly Report don’t play that make this sound like a slice of old Biblical violence set to a beat.
In fact, while there’s plenty of room for humour and bitter laughs, Anomaly Report sound here like they’ve been freelanced to attend a massive conflict and then detail their findings.
“Hey, Satan!” likely, the record’s best cut, is a jazz-rock song about stalking the Devil all the way downtown and pestering them about the quality of their shoes. “Prick” brings to mind confrontational post-punk a la The Birthday Party, and makes Anomaly Report show at its best when it’s at its most direct. And, “I Kissed the Devil,” mixes electronic grooves with resonant piano lines that feel like they’re playing through an old telephone by someone held for ransom.
Where does it all leave ux? Wobbly, but less afraid. What does Anomaly Report stand for? You’d have to be crazy to find yourself a cause these days. “Beautiful Terrible Things,” the title track, sends us on our way. The terrible things are much easier manifested into reality than the beautiful ones, but when’s that ever stopped us all/
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