Mudboy – Music for Any Speed 7” (Disques Lexi)
There’s something about download cards inside of 7”s that makes me want to gripe about various aches and pains while fearing that the vet just put a tracking chip inside of my cat. Not that either “Thaw” or “Freeze” will have iTunes hitting up the nearest temp agency to help with an explosion of single-track orders; it’s just that no one can be blamed for a hint of sour stomach after dutifully chewing up and swallowing the “nothing is sacred” reality re: the basic idea of the 7” (combined with the boys-from-men line of demarcation when hitting on the album-as-artistic-statement vs. song-as-bite-sized-artistic-statement/car-commercial-fodder debate). Mudboy can’t be faulted for making music for a particular R.P.M., as “Thaw” pleasantly passes by as something one could imagine languishing unused on a hard drive belonging to any artist who last received a royalty check from Warp Records in 2002. “Freeze” is of much greater interest (and length at over six minutes), not only as something that should have seen proper release on Warp “back in the day” (a good thing), but as what might have happened if Boards of Canada decided to cover the six-minute chunk of righteousness found smack in the middle of the Dead C.’s “Air.”. That, dear readers, is an endorsement. (http://www.lexidisques.com)
(Andrew Earles)
