Thomas Stearns Eliot, author of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", died in 1965. It was the same year that Bob Dylan released "Highway 61 Revisited", an album that expanded the range of popular song writing forever. Its finest song "Desolation Row" has T.S. Eliot doing battle with Ezra Pound, while "calypso singers laugh at them / and fishermen hold flowers / between the windows of the sea".
So when young Matthew Jennings (aka TALK LESS SAY MORE) takes on the concept of Proof Rock, and quotes the immaculate words of Eliot in cheeky lyric plunderings, he is really sticking his neck out. If he hasn’t done his homework the calypso singers are not going to stifle their belly laughs and this reviewer is not going to pull any punches.
London-based Jennings was a founder member of the radically clever "THE BUTTERFLY", of whom W&H wrote excited things in 2004 and 2006. He has, other projects apart, already released two widely disparate collections of "TALK LESS SAY MORE" music since then. Genre baiting and boundary skirmishing have become a way of life. In the process, of course, he has made traditional commercial success impossible. As with other genuinely creative musicians in the vernacular field, the time frames of industry processes are just too slow.
In such a context, sites like RECORDS ON RIBS make quick, high quality production and immediate, well-framed access a possibility for exploratory music. They also make reviews a bit pointless. All I have to do is persuade you to click and listen. You can make up your own mind whether, or how much, to pay for what you can hear.
Nevertheless, I can promise you an exciting collation of genres and styles that would satisfy Dylan's insistence on homework, and Eliot's love of erudition. Guitar fury, synthesised magic, dubstep stuttering, great tunes, rich vocals, poppy seeds, bloopy noises, indie self-doubt … it’s all in there and it is an elegantly constructed barrel of fun.
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Personally I'm a sucker for a sad song with a heartbreak piano riff, so "The Death Of Air" would sell the whole thing to me. You might go for the tense glitchiness of "I Should Have Been A Pair Of Ragged Claws", imagining, no doubt, a crab scuttling across the floor of a silent sea as you groove along. "Who Is The Third" (the title is a quote from Eliot's "The Waste Land") is an indie classic of a song - crying out to be mixed into a stomping dancefloor monster once your cardigan-shrouded shyness has been obliterated by the absinthe.
There are nine of these remarkable songs - mostly short, but all complete and adding up to a satisfying album of music that benefits from being heard in one sequence by a listener who is happy to shut everything else out for 25 minutes. Perhaps while eating a peach and counting coffee spoons. Talking of Michelangelo will not do.
http://www.myspace.com/talklesssaymore
http://recordsonribs.com/artists/talklesssaymore/proofrock
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