The story is that three American teenagers made an album together. John Michael Foss and Joshua Bertram went to school in Michigan, Chaz Knapp was their one-man diy label in California. Together, talking by telephone and sharing audio files through email, they constructed this album. FatCat found them lurking in Myspace and here we are with "Tooth And Claw" on FatCat's Splinter imprint. It's OUR BROTHER THE NATIVE's debut album and release is set for June 2006 (in the UK). The story is that the three young men still hadn’t met up until a day before their first ever gig in February 2006. The story goes that the gig was in Belgium.
The CD's mood is restless, surreal and childlike. When it ends the silence triggers a feeling of emerging from an intense dream. The 12 titles are sections in a singular musical work that seems to require one continuous span of attention. The individual pieces each have a title but by no means all are tunes or songs in the ordinary sense.
The thematic structure starts wth an introduction and welcome to an aviary, with further pieces named for owls, swifts and falcons. This is followed by welcomes to an arboretum and to the nautical spirits of the aquarium. In the arboretum we meet the catalpa trees, the silver linden and the southern red oak. Once submerged in the the aquarium, we find tracks dedicated to the octopodidae family, the cuttlefish and to the Nautilus cephalopods. These are seriously weird fish.
There are some wilful misspellings in the track titles, there are few claws and fewer teeth among the oddball life forms celebrated here. But those oddities are entirely consistent with the unhinged meanderings, the mind changes and dream-state ravings of the music. Somehow OUR BROTHER THE NATIVE have managed to unlock that surreal creative flow that takes artist and audience into unexpected and scintillating new states of awareness. If the word were not already flattened with overmisuse, the precise term to describe this stuff would be psychedelic. Lacking full commitment to the rules, experience and education of proper musicians and artists Foss, Bertram and Knapp have stumbled into something a bit special.
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If you ask me "what does it sound like?", I can’t really say. You must let your own response take a chance and let the sounds induce that state of hypnotic suggestibility that will give meaning, sensation, emotion and narrative to the singing (occasional) the percussive scrapes and scuttling (almost constant) the sampled mysteries (wide ranging) and to the heavily mutilated staples of bedroom music - guitar and keyboard. Josh's Mum was in there somewhere too, swimming with the octopus, but I can’t remember meeting her. Bird and animal noises permeate all.
If you’re still with me, take a chance on the fact that you enjoyed ANIMAL COLLECTIVE or COCOROSIE and sit down with receptive ears and an open mind. I think you will find that the sound of OUR BROTHER THE NATIVE is not at all like the vinegar soaked kelp burger that it might first appear to be. Once you've conquered the anxiety you will suffer no more than the risk of dependence. (Very light exposure on myspace might develop unhelpful resistances. This stuff requires a full course of listening)
www.myspace.com/ourbrotherthenative
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