It’s obviously getting late. So don’t be reluctant to call this whatever you want. Call it all day. Call it work. Call it a stress test. Call it a call of the wild, wild western value pak, sent pak, pak it in while you still can, braced for impak. Call it thick walls splitting deep seams and big sleeps under a collapse-ceiling duvet. Call it maelstrom. Call it hatch battening. Call it calm in a time of folksy animal abuse analogies on the progressive side of debate. Call its name through a glad din, glad you’re drowned out in red hot spite of yourself. Call it horseshit thru the wrong side of the glue factory exhaust fan. Call it just to hear the sound of its voice. Call it in for the night. Call it in for that endless fucking night. Call it sinister love. Call it one song or a dozen. Call it tight-rolled, close-knit quilted quicker picker-upper. Call it crying. Call it flailing. Call it desperate. Call it on the line. Call it calling out, pleading to whoever’ll listen.
Rough and ready, raw and replenishing, Corsano and Orcutt. The answer to any call worth making and a round repudiation of ordering principles and prescribed prerequisite. They shake out in the middle of the room (your head) like heedless sopping dogs, spraying out some wholesome greenslime smoothie upon all in its muggy circumference. Their sound is stirring in ways both contagious and confrontational. It is the fresh sting we didn’t know we wanted needed. The memetic diagram gracing Brace Up!’s cover is a beautifully succinct summation of what’s inside: human turbine Corsano is the whirling skyward anchor, Orcutt the fearless lunge, and this album the total world destruction they (and we all) precariously orbit.
The former Harry Pussy guitarist, having provided one of the highlights of last year with his self-titled solo album, sounds more p&v primed for the times than ever. He shreds on Corsano’s always awe-inspiring cascades with a grinding rock spirit that seems more 2018 essential than any pedestrian or ironically tender protest song, incidental mumblesing and all. If there are good words for what is happening to us, they’ve all been used and then some. Even those with the sly advantage of being professionally tasked to extol exasperation over the redundancy of everyone else are inescapably stumbling into what they #loathe. The restless exclamations hurled about on this record are onomatopoeias that have yet to acquire their own block letter comic book bubble homes. They are peals of unobservably vast revelations that one can only tilt at like a trepidatious Terry Gilliam fan, looking to see where The Man Who Killed Don Quixote isn’t screening. That there are curious, often funny (“He do The Police in Different Voices” is a fave) titles doesn’t change this. We are all expert mad-libbers now, yes. But — and of course this is a small, small thing — even the most arbitrary of titles beats none at all.
These two still out there doing what they do — with or without the cavalcade of amazing folk (Joe McPhee, Richard Bishop, Paul Flaherty, Okkyung Lee, Nate Wooley, Michael Morley, Mick Flower, Mette Rasmussen, and Tashi Dorji, to name a few) they do it with — is a big, big thing. Hearing them is truly being present when all else is endlessly angling toward some lucrative advantage, most often falling out of frame in mid-pitch. Of course, we’ve all been falling, naturally falling faster as we go. And none can catch or even break this fall when the taken-for-solid ground itself is falling along with us. Best to gasp when there’s no grasp. Incoherent, blurted last words have their charm. The leviathan smiles. The mess says, “well ain’t you cute,” plum plummeting with implausible aplomb. Nice knowing us? Well, that dep….
More about: Bill Orcutt, Chris Corsano
