Review:'Orcutt, Bill' 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts'
- Album: 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts'
- Label: 'Editions Mego'
- Genre: 'Blues'
- Release Date: '15th January 2011'- Catalogue No: 'eMEGO 119'
Our Rating:
I like discord. I like noise. Avant-gardism and experimental music fascinates me, and I'm more than happy to listen to music that eschews the conventions of what most consider music for hours. As such, I can live without rhythm, melody, even tune. Bill Orcutt, formerly of chaotic noiseniks Harry Pussy, is no friend of melody or tunefulness, and he's all about pushing the boundaries.
Orcutt's latest album, an expanded reissue of 2009's 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts' is, to my ears at least, a step too far. Starting with 'Lip Rich,' it's a cacophonous racket, the sound of a guitar with unusual tuning and two strings missing being jerked around, tweaked, flailed and poked. Stuttering flurries of notes at irregular intervals trip over one another as strings are twanged and stretched and graze against the frets. Still, it makes for an interesting and unusual start.
The trouble is, the next three tracks all sound exactly the same, like a hyperactive deaf child who’s never played guitar in his life pretending to play fiddly solos. Very soon, it all gets a bit much, especially as track four, 'Too Late to Fly' keeps up the frantic anti-riffing for a fraction short of seven minutes. Seven minutes! No need!
We have to wait until track nine before there’s any discernible change in approach: 'High Waisted' is a three-and-a-half-minute feedback drone. It's tolerable, and would work well if located between songs that did something different, had more sonic impact. But no: either side it's just more twangy din.
By the midway point, I'm longing for variety, something different. Hell, I'm wanting to play 'Metal Machine Music' because it's easier on the ear, and long before the end I have a headache and am just longing for it to fucking stop. That the original album has been supplemented with four bonus tracks - two from a previous single and two more previously unreleased - really doesn't help matters, as they take the total running time to an unbearable fifty-one torturous minutes. Conceptually, it's novel, but a couple of tracks would have made the point more than adequately. The rest is overkill.
