::: Mascara Music :::

MASCARA in the Press, read all about it

THE NOISE Magazine
Boston, MA
December 1999

AUDIODODAHDAY by Butch and Brenda

CHRIS MASCARA Fertilizer 14 songs

I'm listening to the second part of "Trenchcoats" as I type this; it's a truly frightening foot-stompin' hoedown, and all sorts of images well up in my mind--Jimmy Page rejecting a similar tune from Zep III as "too intense," demon-ridden bluesmen from Delta Swamps, a dying Edgar Allen Poe wandering the streets of Baltimore in an alcoholic haze, finitely elastic Reed Richards alias Mr. Fantastic being helplessly sucked into the infinite vastness of the Negative Zone, only to be rescued at the last moment by a Ben Grimm impostor--this is best described as a cross between "Bron-y-aur Stomp" and "The Cuckoo Bird" off Harry Smith's magisterial Anthology of American Folk Music... words and superlatives fail me, and l'm left to conclude that, warts and all, this is the finest thing Mr. Mascara has ever done. Of course we've said this before, about "Electrode," "Chromosome," "Carnival, " and "No Afterlife." But to our infinite chagrin, he keeps outdoing himself. And actually, we're glad. Nearly as good is the nasty, minimalistic, but strangely primal and satisfying "Sabor Tooth"—goofy garage punk replete with hammered-down snort gurgle and yammer, sort of like Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin"' as performed by those fun-loving schlocksters in the Cramps as a follow?up to "Caveman." And "Dragonflies" is one of the prettiest tunes Mr. Mascara has ever put his name on. Wonderfully masterful and intense. In a similar mode is "Different," which sounds almost like a variation of "Dragonflies," with similarly wrenching pellucid soi-disant acoustic strumming. We also like the darkly meditative title track. Admittedly. the rest of this demo is all over the map, but if you know where to look there's lots of great stuff to be found—"High School" has this incredibly hot-shit guitar solo in the coda; "Friend Named Bill" is this heavy-duty Zep-esque metal machine drone as syrupy as 500,000 mile crankcase oil, which is both compelling and off-putting by turns. There is much to like in the dark but chirpy "Go Nowhere" and the darkly baroque instant-outtake "Tulsa Girl" as well. The sprightly acoustic remake of "No Afterlife" brings out the song's easy-to-overlook intrinsic melodicism. As for the stuff that doesn't quite work, we have "Hard Again"—bleak and almost schizophrenia?inducing; "In the Sunshower," which sounds like music rejected from a low-budget but very-far-out remake of the film "Alien." We could also live without the pallid throwaway remake of "2000 Man," but we have to admit that (1) the tune is ripe for revival, if only to counterpoise the predictably forthcoming remakes of "1999" and (2) it's nice, for the first time, to understand the lyrics. Overall, he's batting about .350, but music like this is no game. My pick for tape of the month for March. *****

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