Open City, “Dusty Sweets, Bit Parts”

“Free-Rock,” man, fuckin’ free-rock. I don’t know…it’s always been a blind spot with me. The last free-rock/noise album that really got up my butt and did the five finger dance was, I think, Wrong’s “Vaginum” 1-sided LP, and that was like eight fucking years ago! From the perspective of two of the talking ass-bags in that movie “Waking Life,” we become totally different people every seven years or so. That means the last free-rock album I liked happened to me in a previous life!

It’s something about the percussion…drums and noise just never really work for me. So many free drummers take that Sunny Murray “play all the drums at once, drum roll-drum roll-drum roll, and SPLASHSPLASHSPLASHSPLASH go the cymbals AGGHHHHH look at me I’m PRIMAL!” approach, flailing about with no internal logic and no real sense of driving the song along. Rashied Ali, WHERE ARE YOU?!?!?!

I can’t say Open City is undoing these prejudices to any great degree. Guitar seems to be the big news on this one…despite some pretty standard “extended techniques,” some of the sonics here are truly fresh – it’s not all Derek Bailey chord knots or high speed upper-fret pick-shredders, but the occasional bout of momentum and excitement, fast flashes of stutter and skitter that get the blood pumping. It’s nothing to get the Henry Kaiser of ’81 any reason to lose sleep, but breaks me out of my scowly, crossed-arm skepticism for maybe a minute or two at a time here and there, and that’s saying quite a bit.

Because this “art form” requires only virtuosity (of a sort) and punishes either prior preparation or posthumous damage control (just live in the moment, maaaan), all the really good bits sound just as accidental as the plodding ones, like a thoughtless sine wave oscillating between good and suck.

To be fair, as “this sort of thing” goes, it’s better than many similar things that I’ve heard, and I’d say that these guys probably do this several times a week and have that old collective telepathy down to a science. Of course, you could say the same thing about firemen…they’re doing what they do all the time and I’m sure they all know how to weave and dodge around each other in tight situations. It’s just that I just go from day to day hoping that I never need a fireman’s services.