I love the press for this one: “[B]oth have been
responsible for exporting massive amounts of scrabled [sic] Ohioan jams to us hopeless normies for years now.” I imagine
“scrabled” is a scrambled/garbled mashup; regardless, it perfectly encapsulates
the squirmy smears and fractured blurts emanating from Steel Dangerous, aka
Doug Gent (Moth Cock), and Tiger Village, aka Tim Thronton (CDX, Suite 309). If
you’ve seen these two guys around (and these two guys do get around), then
you’ll probably know what to expect. If you’re like, “What’s a Moth Cock?,”
then I can’t help you.
Still, whether you’re a “hopeless normie” like me or
one of those rabid insane collectors with literally every Orange Milk release
ever, you best beware when you enter the “Split” between these two. Gent’s a
scribbler on his Steel Dangerous side, filling every conceivable space he can
with sound, whether it’s saxophone or synthesizer or samples of saxophone and
synthesizer (and who’s to say what’s what anymore?). It’s easy to get lost as
it all bleeds together, but it’s also easy to trip over an outstretched trill
or EQ spike and severely injure yourself, and how are you going to call the
paramedics way out here with no cell signal? Anyway, take it at your own risk.
Tim Thornton’s not even kidding around with Tiger
Village this time. How do you explain a twenty-two-minute track (“Night Some II
[All Night]”) to start off his side? That won’t top any charts! If I were a
record exec, like Mike Nigro at Oxtail Recordings, I’d be like, “Tim, I love
ya, but I can’t sell this. We need a hit, Tim, a hit!” But in the end it won’t
matter because Tiger Village plays to the slow burners out there, weaving a
synth soundtrack into the neon night air. He appends to it two additional
dreamers that encase your head like a flickering cloud and lull you to
oblivion. This night was made for the soft patches.
Ohioans: is there anything the weird ones can’t do?
--Ryan