Cassette tape from P’derrigerreo in America – Bandcamp indicates they’re based in Connecticut, but the envelope arrived from Portland in Maine sent by “PDG Band”. Inside I find half a playing card badly distressed and faded by the sun, plus a note reading “I hope that you’re charmed by our music” and signed Patrick.
Spinning Live in (A) Basement (SPLEEN COFFIN SP-59-CS) now, I’m happy to report this listener is both charmed and excited by this strange mix of demented songs, guitar rock, collage, noise and general air of barmy loopiness released on my favourite underground US label (one of many favourites), Spleen Coffin. This band (if indeed it is one) has a handful of funny-looking releases on their Bandcamp page, go by several aliases and misspellings – Pidare y Gerreo, PidarryJarryOh, and Puhdarre EE Jerio – and their lineup varies from one release to the next, indicating they might be more of a loose collective of like-minded happy-loon types, joining in each project as needed, much like a hippy commune rotating the farm chores. On this release, I can read credits for Dara Mysliewicz, Chris Mathison, Pierre Plantevin, and Patrick Foley, plus other persons who are “siphoned ethereally”.
While I personally wish for more of the noisy dementia of ‘Corpulent Ether’ which opens the tape, there’s much to be said for the tripped-out semi-acoustic songs ‘Golden Hour’ and ‘What Am I Saying?’, reminiscent of lo-fi geniuses like Sebadoh but enriched with occasional harmony vocals in a psychedelic sunshine pop mode, and interrupted by incongruous robot rhythms from a drum machine. All of side B is taken up with ‘The Endless House’, an oddity which departs from whatever template they have set themselves on the A side…a bad-trip organ drone enriched with added spooky detritus, on top of which are distorted and cut-up spoken-word tapes recounting a supernatural event, a nightmarish dream, or both. It gets even more unsettling, as more voices join the episode, so grimly altered as to appear like damned spirits attempting to break through from the other side. This must be the “ethereal siphon” at work. A horror-movie in miniature in just 20:12 mins.
If one can dare to invoke that old canard of “New Weird America”, here’s a band who come much closer to delivering the sort of cranky, ornery mix of songs, rock, and crazy homebrew lysergic noise that we’d hoped to get from Sunburned Hand of the Man, but never really did. A fine slice of dark imagination from the underground. From 18 December 2023.