I don’t know what to make of this Dave Public character. On the one
hand, his “Same Old Scene” is a tape-manipulation nightmare, a noise-tastrophe
of spool-shredding proportions. There’s not a jury on this earth that would
acquit the man of cassette-icide. But the ride is a good one, the trip a
freakadelic brown acid meltdown that’ll increase your “Dokillys”
by fifty or so. But that’s just the start.
“Prairie Rose” is a shimmering exercise in stasis, an ambient slow
burner whose timbre comes close to those singing bowl thingees I can’t play
properly but pretend to have skill at doing every time I’m served champagne at
a wedding. Before something even more confusing happens, let’s just let
ourselves get lost in this hall of mirrors, this fractal palace, as Roxy Music
nips at the edges of our imagination. But they can’t, because More Than This won’t let them. It’s not
the right vibe.
That’s why there’s “NL51217,” something I thought for sure was named
after a star but only turned up weird BMW pdf files. It’s a live document
lasting sixteen minutes and the entirety of side B, but it coalesces Dave Public’s
inclinations on the first two tracks into a cohesive journey or meditation or
something along those lines. It’s a rippling noise extravagance, a bright
pulsing treat piped in from elsewhere in the galaxy. So maybe it is a star
after all!
Posts
