Like the punny name Grady Roper’s adopted for his
nerdwave output, Attic Ted’s music winks really, really hard to try to get you
on its page while it’s disturbing the molecules of your stereo speakers with
its wobbly soundwaves from another planet. But those winks are for the truly
stupid, the baffled, the squares who can’t understand that a man standing
there, violently batting a single eyelid in their direction, is trying to let
them in on a secret, on a joke. They just wrinkle their noses in disgust and go
back to watching the CMAs on cable television.
But that presumes that Attic Ted is trying to reach
that kind of audience anyway. Not on your life.
I mean, who else clearly has stacks of worn-out Gary
Numan and Devo and Cars records lying around their living room and expects to
interact with society in general in a standard way, not some inverted or
cockeyed approach that’s clearly meant to hook only the most specific of
outsider? I’m pretty sure Attic Ted is a rare breed, and that makes Kafka Dreaming, his latest in a great
run for Pecan Crazy, another gem worth searching out. It’s not for nothing that
you feel like you’re transforming into a cockroach as you listen to it, tides
of surreality hitting you in disbelief as track after track of angled and
warped some-kind-of-pop-with-some-kind-of-“wave”-appended vibrates through your
core. Then you wake up the next day and you ARE that cockroach. Spooky.
Applying a one-man-band approach, heavy on the
synthesizers and drum machines and chintzy guitar (think the tone perfected by
Ryan Howe’s Punks on Mars project), Attic Ted sounds like Larry Wish if Ric
Ocasek was doing the vocals instead of Eeyore. (And I love me some Larry Wish.)
It all comes together superbly, with Millar weaving his through eight
warped-VHS concoctions, each one in need of a little tracking but pretty close
to how its supposed to feed over the heads. Perhaps that cockroach made a nest
in the pile of VHS tapes in the garage. Perhaps Attic Ted is just field
recording those tapes for our benefit. Oh wait – the cockroach is you, your
nest is in your own bed. My bad!
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