Little Claw: Human Taste

This review comes courtesy of: two hours of internet browsing about music (which contrary to this here profession of mine I consider to be a new low for humanity), two cups of coffee, five pages of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (which is one of the few of his I hadn’t yet read. Anyone wants to call it homoerotic you’re welcome round to mine for some wrestling to the death…), and the fact that the one remaining microphone stand in this house is being used by my housemate so I can’t do any recording. It’s raining a lot and I haven’t left the house.

Right now the members of Little Claw are screaming “there’s No Way Out” over some two note chugging and a wailing guitar, and I mean wailing as in wailing like the end is not nigh, but happening. No Way Out, now there’s a subject I can get my teeth into. The song is called ‘Frankie’. As this is yet another release from Ecstatic Peace! (Vinyl on NotNotFun) I thought I smelled the Sunburned Hand’s fingers (which surfaced unexpectedly on the good times of yet another grand EP! missive: Matt Krefting’s new LP, which I reviewed here), after all their EcsPce! debut Z had precious little information in its sleeve notes besides a photograph of a sign saying NO WAY OUT.

This photo was at least in part a tribute to an LP of L Voag’s from 1980, which was a heady influence on those Boston boys. L Voag was a member of The Homosexuals until 1979 until he left to do his thing. But while in discussion with an Old Man (sorry Chris, you’re the casualty of a haphazardly extended theme) who lives by the Sea round the corner from I, just so happened to be manning the decks at a Sunburned show and produced/engineered both work by the Homosexuals and L Voag, yes, while in discussion with that very maxi-haired warrior Sunburned found out that all along L Voag’s 1980 solo album was in fact called The Way Out. Now that might not seem of great importance to many of you but for people who constantly ask the question “is there a way out?”, like me, it’s clearly a bona fide Moment.

Do you believe there is a Way Out? Use the comments forum below. Or just express why you agree/disagree, as you wish. If I were you I wouldn’t leave comments either.

Meanwhile…

This Little Claw album is really very good, it fuelled that splurge up above, which I needed to get out there breathing and kick out the door because otherwise I might leave the house myself and do something stupid like go to a town, or even worse, start browsing the internet. Why not earn some money by writing about music? Well, when you’ve spent too many hours in the past month listening to things like Wilco, Conor Oberst and Ganglians it’s easy to lose sight of even that Zeppelin of a goal.

There are all manner of howls and screams going on back there, behind the energetic throb of these thrashy, drowned rat sing-songs. The percussion is mostly a start stop, maniacally simple blend of bangings and clinkings, with the occasional hard-to-the-right egg-shaker and now and then some hard-to-the-left tip tapping. The discordance doesn’t tread the line between noise and song, it wanders off and draws a new one with whatever it is these Portlanders are dragging behind them. Like that mirror in this always-fun video from No Neck Blues Band eh?

They have other things in common with NNCK, the acid trudge, the living thrust of sudden ideas and the way that feedback seems to start harmonising in ways it shouldn’t manage while left to its own devices. I’ve been in a room with that kind of whirl, I even played in a band who had pretty much nothing else going for them but that very thing.

But there is a fine balance betwixt the two poles here, between the no-song and super song. This record satiates my neurotic need for some noise and incorporates a groove and a memorable melody to boot. Magik Markers fans take note: You may well get rather excited by this album. The Human Taste is a murky palate cleanser and a mouthful at once. There is some raw rock and roll swagger dancing it’s way from the depths of ‘Breathing Tape’, and now some pure I love strumming these two chords meets I love singing through this echo meets I love playing these two notes on this organ and fucking with an oscillator meets I love making slide guitar sound weird on the absolutely killer ‘Golden Boy’. This energy comes bounding at you, rag tag and bandit-wise, straight from the mouth of the canyon from the word go.

Maybe that’s it, maybe I love the kind of joyous naïveté that can come bursting out of people who think everything’s fucked but count the “I think everything’s fucked” posture in the “most fucked way of posturing” category. It’s a hard won joy, and though some people might think this is a horrible, rambling mindfuck of a record I feel like I have found some people to relate to, people who are throwing their all into it and likely not expecting much because they’re going to have to keep filling in Benefit forms, or doing menial jobs or suit jobs or whatever it is for most of their lives, because I don’t think Mojo magazine just called to set up a feature length interview.

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth is at the helm of the label (in good company I’m sure), and although I like most of their releases more than any of his band’s output Little Claw certainly share some ground with SY. A friend of mine doesn’t like them because of what he calls the “nursery rhyme singing” and I often agree. Little Claw do a little of that too but in this instance I like it. They also do some proper jam-rambling on tracks like ‘Lay to Waste’ with the vocalist lazy-dream cooing until the simple idea runs out of itself and slows to a halt. She is as at home here as she is singing in a thin but powerful register, overdriven and multitracked on the abrasive grind of ‘Colors You Drown’, gleefully singing something like:

“I don’t want to talk about this town, ‘cause colors in a bath will always drown”

Right now the lyrics don’t matter a jot to me, they will surface later, much better when not subjected to a desperate search, like The Way Out. After a couple of spins I have certainly tasted enough Human for the day (musically at least), but I’ll be back for more, I’m certain of that.