From The One That Cut You

謎めいたバンドリーダーFred Laneによる1980年代のカルト的アルバム2作品『Car Radio Jerome』『From The One That Cut You』がGonerよりリイシュー!ダダイスト的なタイトルやシュールレアリズム的なアートワーク、不条理で奇妙な歌詞、カントリーからジャズ、モリコーネ風の西部劇サントラへと変化する素晴らしい音楽性など、Laneの音楽や人生一般に対する偏愛はリスナーを長年魅了し続け、インターネット上ではその謎解きや噂が絶えなかったそうです。2020年にLaneのドキュメンタリー映画『Icepick To The Moon』が公開され、これまで何世代にもわたってファンを悩ませてきた謎や詳細がわかりましたが、それでもなお彼の音楽は他のどのレコードとも異なるオリジナリティーに溢れています。

From the One That Cut You starts out like a relatively straightforward, if not quite professional, big-band jazz record, only to get progressively stranger and more surreal as it goes on. A portion of the songs -- including the title track, a weepy country ballad parody -- come from a stage production (also entitled "From the One That Cut You") and find Lane working a sort of low-rent Bobby Darin-meets-sex offender persona. While the self-consciously silly scat vocal interlude on "Fun in the Fundus" is enough to induce a slight cringe, Lane and company generally handle the humor aspect with about as much finesse as is possible, and parts -- like the spoken word interlude in the country ballad title track -- are really funny in a disturbing sort of way. The instrumental portions -- which include a shambling spy rock tune, a Captain Beefheart-evoking skronk rock workout "Mystic Tune," and bit of Art Ensemble of Chicago-ish improv -- share the same sort of menacing/goofy ambiguity as the vocal numbers do, also revealing more of the ensemble's avant-garde underpinnings. The album climaxes with "Rubber Room," a minor-key piano lounge ballad that eventually gets overtaken by a mass of squelching, skronking horns, to rather disorienting effect. Taken as a whole, From the One That Cut You is such a collision of different elements -- absurd humor, genre parodies, avant-garde jazz-derived improvisation, and an almost no-wave-like dissonance/attitude at points -- that it really doesn't compare with anything else in terms of sound or sensibility. It's an album destined to appeal only to specialized, unorthodox tastes, but it does have a left-field charm that fans of Shockabilly and certain other Shimmy-Disc artists, for example, may well be able to relate to. ~ William York