Moon Pool & Dead Band – “Patsy” b/w “Patsy (Jack Ruby Version)” 7” (Cass)
Patti Smith said a few years back that New York City had closed itself off to the young and the struggling, and that they should make their art elsewhere. Her two recommendations were Detroit and Poughkeepsie, NY. I haven’t heard a lot of great music out of Poughkeepsie (actually I can’t recall that I’ve heard any music made there by locals), so what is Detroit’s excuse, continuing to grind out shitty, historically indoctrinated modern music of interest only to the people within its crumbling walls? There’s a downside to being able to have a lot of space for cheap: there’s little motivation to improve, and with a few exceptions (obviously the city’s rich history of dance music, which keeps growing and changing, and the occasional awesome record, not really much lately outside of the second Frustrations LP or Tyvek’s Nothing Fits, and just because, how about the Dirtbombs), there is little sign of the rampant creativity that this relaxed, contracted economy is meant to stoke. Moon Pool & Dead Band is a dance music project started up by Nate Young of Wolf Eyes, along with David Shettler from power pop band the Sights; they have an innate understanding of monotony in music (check out Young’s LP on NNA Tapes), and transfer it to beats that sound, well, dead. Dead, cheap, obscured by hiss and buried in history long since told, over and over. “Patsy” gets about as far as Lee Harvey Oswald did, and the remix on the flip barely changes it up. Young has conquered the dead machines motif (not to be confused with his Wolf Eyes bandmate John Olson’s side project Dead Machines, though it is understandable to get them mixed up), but the problem with resurrecting a dead circuit is that it can’t tell you anything new about where it’s been – it just keeps grinding on, with no soul or ability to flex. Putting this up against the traditions of Detroit techno is kind of a joke, so don’t do it, okay? (http://www.cassrecords.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
