Brake cleaner, gum cutter, motor oil additive: good luck scrubbing your hands clean. After years, the chemicals become an integral part of your bloodstream and define your complexion. The dust of rust caught in your eyelids becomes a part of your vision. The smell of coolant follows you like a cooking ghost. And that synthetic blend you bath in, well, that’ll take a few decades to carpet clean that out of your rug. Terry Funk would know.
Mike Cooper would know, as he commands, “Breath the gas,” then asks, “Are you smiling?” with a serene vocal delivery to be filed in the scrap metal department of Takoma Records. His voice is the only serene component of “Industrial Hazard.” Grayson Cooke’s Nasty film degradation is matched with Cooper’s nasty lap steel guitar and lyrics. The chemically ruined film is the human body, gasping and boiling, suffering like Job on the ground with his sores.
“Are you smiling?”
Ought to be. Life is a miracle filled with wild days. Sores or no sores; coolant or no coolant: it’s a wonderful life. From a different and wider angle, that lap steel guitar and that degraded film are beautiful, engaged in transformation, a change and fluster of activity that is unavoidable in life, and should be embraced with a smile; gratitude. Hazards, industrial or not, are the spice of life.
It must be Mike Cooper’s serene vocals in the center of the chemical brew that’s making me feel this way - all smiles. He’s got it nailed down here.
• Mike Cooper: http://www.cooparia.com
• Backwards: http://www.backwards.it/releases
More about: Mike Cooper
