Valet: False Face Society

Naked Acid by Valet is a great record. I can’t tell you why, because I haven’t heard a single slippery second of it. This has happened to me a number of times, and usually I’m dead right. I have an eye for an unmet friend, it’s one of the only things I do well. I have seen the cover art, which did nothing to dissuade me.

One day it’ll be me swimming towards that mouth, and once I’ve swum up through the honeycomb and nestled in the braid, I’ll be asking,

“Where are we going?”…

“To quench the forest fire”…

“Ok”

I love the cover art for this one too… the penny has dropped, I’m buying me one of these. Hey, I might just order both! Ah RATS! Naked Acid is only on cd, what a joke. No swimming. Well except for the backstroke my lizard brain is doing right now through ‘Dealer vs Ocean’. I can see why this Honey Owens (the Jackie O Motherfuckerer who’s swinging like an ape goddess through my mangrove of prehistory brain tangle, aka Valet) has Nico in her top friends. It’s also making me think of this great Brigitte Fontaine track I heard a while back, there’s a similar looming dressed up in hush.

I’m listening to False Face Society on my computer. First point: it makes the computer look like a colossal joke, like one of those doggie gramophones that stops them from scratching their brains out when they have a stitch or whatever it is they’re after. Like the most effective set of blinkers ever made: why hide the world when you can make people forget it’s even there? Second: It’s just playing these three killer tracks over and over, it’s a short record at just shy of half your hour, but I’m beginning to wonder when it’s going to stop, and who is going to stop it. I’m not going to, I’ve hit the mainline. ‘Angels Can’t Stop’, that’s right Ms Owens.

There’s a thick Cornish drizzle falling outside (a mizzle, we say) and I can just smell the coal smoke that I can see drifting out of one of the chimneys beyond. It’s bliss. This morning I thought I was losing it, when did I last have fun I asked myself. But now I don’t care, because I’ve lost it. The music of Valet has no particular view of the world, just a view. It’s colossal and enlivening. Thick layers of drone, murmurings, slow moans from fuzzed guitars, wavering and ascending with more pain, desire and fear than some people experience in a lifetime. It’s no spook house ticket though; the fear is in there but as with all my favourite drone visitors she doesn’t come to intimidate. Not personally anyhow.

Slightly off point: Can anyone tell me who that crazy vocalist (she may or may not be Japanese) who does that long, accelerating version of the Hare Krishna chant is? I think she does tracks where she just breathes in far out ways. Some of the vocals on this record brought back memories of mass hysteria at a rum party on my friends boat and I want to go find whatever record it was that we listened to fifteen times in a row. It was that woman, whoever she is.

There’s a Boris/Michio Kurihara cover at the end, in the form of ‘Rainbow’. “Something this sweet, could be a pendulum” she sings over hand drums and a simple electric guitar figure, like a poltergeist in the house of reverb. The raucous, rook-like cawing of the fuzz lead is spot on. The song fits well alongside the two expansive underfunk oceans. By introducing lyrics and the wake up and stay sleeping hand-drums she places a beguiling human character in the midst of the two landscapes you had been exploring, until now under the impression of being alone. The soaring and indistinguishable words she intones on ‘Angels Can’t Stop’ and ‘Dealer vs Ocean’ are elemental, blending seamlessly into an animistic groove.

False Face Society is good music. It’s only confirmed my desire for Naked Acid, so I took another run at the mountain, typing the record into a search bar.

What I found was an interview with Lady GaGa. It’s a heavy mix of implied snatch, pseudo underground credentials and submissive anti authoritarianism. Initially I doubted her claim to have often taken acid, sitting naked in a field… but then this passage seemed to confirm it,

"I'm quite sure that if it were 1968, I may not be the Lady GaGa that I am today," she said in the Daily Star. "I might be arguing with Yoko Ono and trying to win John Lennon's heart and chasing The Beatles in a bus on LSD, hoping that one of them hands me a microphone one day."

Is she chasing the Beatles who are on a bus? Is she in the bus chasing the Beatles who are on foot? Who’s on LSD? The fucking Bus??? Does she want Lennon’s heart alone, or Lennon’s body with it? So many questions. She’s “quite sure” that she “may” not be this Lady GaGa if it were 1968. This girl is fried! I’m going to go and listen to her music!

And that’s how I ended my first three hours with False Face Society, with a bad bump in a digital brothel where nothing's for sale, because it’s all in hock and rotten to the core.