KAY ODYSSEY “Knock Out!” (Pecan Crazy)

 

Ho hum, another day, another awesome tape from Pecan Crazy. Kay Odyssey is an Austin four-piece dream rock/indie band along the Belly/Lush spectrum, but with some heavily vibrato’d Sleater-Kinney-esque vocals. Honestly, did you just read that sentence or not? Because if you did, you should be drooling all over your clean shirt right now – there’s nothing not to like in that sentence. In fact, you should be running to the phone and calling the Pecan Crazy ordering desk. (Or going to the website, either one.)
 
This is a full ten-song burner (eleven if you count the cassette-only hidden track, and you should!). The guitars are recorded crisply and cleanly, the distortion compressed, the drums smacking away in clockwork foundation. Kristina Boswell’s voice expertly flits over the top of the compositions like a bird periodically alighting on a Marshall stack, but never once straining to be heard above the rest of the band. This is expertly crafted and mixed, and should be a staple for all you indie rock lifers still out there. I’m queueing up my VHS copies of 120 Minutes right now to get even more of a fix. If you don’t have VHS tapes like that, you can just play Knock Out! over again – no one would judge you.
 
https://kayodyssey.bandcamp.com/
 
https://pecancrazy.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

ATTIC TED “Kafka Dreaming” (Pecan Crazy)

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!

https://atticted.bandcamp.com/

https://pecancrazy.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

ATTIC TED “Kafka Dreaming" C33 (Pecan Crazy)

You know what they say about circus coitus, right? It’s fucking intense*, and fairly unhygienic.

The name "Attic Ted” is loaded with enough macabre, sensational ambiguity to stun a mule, lending the wandering mind to favor paths down dusty, blood splattered, yellow-and-red-striped wallpaper'd corridors…and this newest offering of theirs, laid upon the altar, “Kafka Dreaming”, continues to do their nom de guerre a serious solid (gut-punch, that is) in naming the kind of specialized mood one needs to be in, in order to fall rapt (cult-ified?) with LOVE over such capital “P” performance artists. 

This ain’t everyone’s cup o’ tea is what I’m saying, here. The vocals are polemic (exquisite) AF, and the carnie vibe slips seamlessly into Middle Eastern territory again and again, which may turn off some purist cow-punkers out there, but, hey, like, daaaaaang… what a meld, for those looking to get out of pop/western-caged tropes! What a glorious ride, not even considering the synth-culled noise accompaniments that pop in and out of the mix like concerned alien-host families hovering over a true barn-burner of a party!

This is fucking great. There. I said it. If the offspring of the B-52s all went on a consensual psychotic break and dubbed themselves “The Beef-Hefty Whose?”, a few of these “Kafka Dreaming” songs’d likely spring up. Fuck yes!

https://atticted.bandcamp.com/

and/or

https://pecancrazy.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

*(say it out loud)

ATTIC TED "Parade Dust Mischief / And All the Early Vinyl" C54 (Pecan Crazy Records)

Hawt dhaaaamn be this some bad-ass, Carni-fied Cow-Punk!! Or is it Country-fried Funhouse Jamz? Either way, with them creepy organs, two-steppin beats, jaunty, warble-pedal’d guitars, drugged, dark vocals (and some freaky falsetto), these here folx are pretty proud to record it all on vintage recording equipment, with a “zero digital” ethic, which is surprising, considering the expertly-woven layers of dynamic noise that are constantly snaking full blast throughout the tracks. Did I mention the disembodied horns section? Capital “P” PEP! They’ve taken the best aspects of the Meat Puppets (II) and Man Man (Six Demon Bag) and strung them together with a sinister panache that makes this tape a must listen for anyone seeking new angles in the old maze of western musics. Catchy but gritty, flirting with old tropes, all the while stretching just past pop’s predictable polish and into sweet, sweet darkness. Waltzing with the devil!

http://pecancrazy.com/

and/or

https://atticted.bandcamp.com/album/parade-dust-mischief

-- Jacob An Kittenplan