Cat Killer - Downtown [Speed Tapes]

Speed Tapes seem to be picking up steam. First it turned heads with the Soloing Over Alanis Morissette tape (exactly what it sounds like) then released the guitar concrète jams of Patriotic Window Klings that I covered recently. And now we have Cat Killer, a band name I love but a lot of cat lovers out there will despise, the solo project of Dylan Baldi (Neon Tongues, Cloud Nothings.)
Baldi fills the tape with cloudy guitar and/or synth driven instrumentals. But it's really the cloudiness that wins out, you hear ghosts of guitars and many keyboards but will rarely catch a glimpse with thine own eyes. I tend to be a little wary of rock-influenced instrumentals but the first side of the tape, "Samba," is quite nice. Baldi builds a series of pulsing arpeggios on top of each other, propelling the track through the misty reverb. Midway, Baldi takes the track apart and rebuilds it into another eerier formation with a near-dissonant piano run until all that's left is a lone drum machine kick that I never even noticed in the first place.
Two tracks fill out the b-side and the title track is the first up. It has a noticeably more "pop" vibe. It retains the hazy, lo-fi production values but amounts to a mellow synth-pop ditty hearkening back to The Magnetic Fields' early days. Composed from a simple drum track and a mess of synth lines, I feel the track is definitely aided by its "lo-fi-ness." The production-value obscures the details and reveals the melodic nugget at the center of the track. It's straight up impressionist pop. "Open Package" closes the tape. This jam has a slight Gary Numan vibe but upbeat instead of, you know, paranoid. A staccato keyboard melody is hammered out for a while forming the base of the track until another keyboard contributes a more lyrical melody over top. The tape is nothing earth shattering but it's not trying to be; it's an easy rider, optimized for cruising and nothing more.
100 copies, still in print. You know the drill.

Patriotic Window Klings - Guitargument [Speed Tapes]

The Patriotic Window Klings are, aside from being one of the best named bands in recent memory, a psych-damaged duo from one of the Carolinas (North?) but their myspace now says London so I'm all confused. Though listening to Guitargument probably aided all the confusion.
This tape is like the fourth shrink-wrapped tape I've owned in my life, the first two were the Space Jam soundtrack and Bad Hair Day by 'Weird' Al Yankovich though so it's more like the second of my mature musical life. What bearing does that have on the music? None. But I feel compelled to mention it cause of how goddam weird it is to see a tape in shrink-wrap. So, Speed Tapes, thanks for making me remember and confront the fact that I owned a Weird Al tape. Thanks a lot...
Alright, enough of this bullshit. Guitargument rumbles to a strong but leisurely start with the two-minute title track. A hypnotic, post-blues guitar riff anchors the jam with a precise tick-tock feeling upon which the Klings pile up a pastiche of fuzzed-out pentatonic solos along with a indecipherable recording from a movie or something. It's one of my favorites from the tape and lays out the vibe pretty well. "Beak Returns" veers back and forth between a noise tape and like Blues Control or something. There's some guitar solo/drum machine action going on but plenty of scraping guitar and whathaveyou disrupting the groove. "Black Ditch Walk" is even more splintered, decontextualizing blues riffage and inserting it into some free floating tape-splice menagerie. "Sauchiehall" has more movie samples and acts like the "Take My Breath Away" of the tape. You know, the default mellow, vaguely romantic, uh, warped blues/musique concrète jam. Lovely piece though. "The Donkey Park" lets two guitars trade mournful licks while "Concrete" flips the script with a buoyant uptempo classic rock riff and chugging power chords that gets pried apart as it goes along. "Endless Smoke" is another favorite. It's hazier than a lot of the other tracks with a great melodic chord progression.
"Dog" starts off the second side. It's another two minute track and probably the most collaged of the cassette. "Walton Towers" brings in some more smoky blues dirge riffs with manipulated effects and random clatter. I think there might even be an organ in here. A surprisingly lovely dual guitar melody/counter-melody bit bleeds over into "Slab of Puce" until it takes up a rhythmic cycle of wah'd guitar groans. "Rabid Shoes" takes things a step weirder with theremin-esque pitch manipulation over some borderline metal guitar riffs. "Dusky" seals things up with more weird groans and pitch manipulation with new blues-rock guitarchitecture underneath (see what I did there?) and breaks into another repeated riff and some weird-ass loop of a kid asking something unintelligible amidst the clanging of jingle bells.
It took me a few spins to get into Guitargument, but what makes it work is, despite its leisurely, wandering pace, is the Klings never take their eye off the rhythm. Furthermore, the rhythmic element of the album rarely comes from things traditionally used to provide rhythm (i.e. drums) which makes things a ton more interesting. The Patriotic Window Klings are giving the standard dudes-jammin'-on-guitars genre a much needed facelift and I'm all for it.
Check Speed Tapes for copies.

Soloing Over Alanis Morissette - Soloing Over Alanis Morrisette [Speed Tapes]

What does Soloing Over Alanis Morissette sound like you may ask? Well, the question can be answered quite easily by reading this project's moniker. Apparently, it's a teen from the Chicago suburbs named Dave Gerhard and he's created one of the more pleasurable and certainly one of the weirdest WTFs I have come across.
I'm not necessarily sure how important my role is here since you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, but Gerhard takes a couple of Alanis's biggest hits and improvises guitar solos over them. To his credit you can tell he is actually paying attention to the songs and forming his improvisations around them--it's not a lame exercise in irony. "You Oughta Know" is a great choice for the opener because Alanis's relentlessly hilarious histrionics put the whole track in a state of constant climax, making the whole duration perfect soil for some burning, cathartic guitar leads. As a personal bonus this tape is the first time I've heard Alanis say "fuck" cause I'd only heard her music (censored) on the radio or in stores or whatever. I really like on the third track, where "Ironic" is the source material, when Gerhard occasionally sings along, murmuring "his very pretty wife" (despite the actual lyrics being "his beautiful wife"). I think singing along with slightly incorrect lyrics is one of the things can be called a universal human experience; relating to the tape is part or maybe most of the fun. The last track "SOAM Gets HEALTHY!" doubles the weird factor by adding some of HEALTH's bootyshaking into the soloing over "Thank You" (which is a weird enough song in its own right, or at least the music video is...) The result is some sort of inbred Alanis Morissette rave mix, somehow both sedate and rabid, even more bizarre than the Alan Jackson club remix cassingle I picked up at Goodwill last year.
Maybe it's because I grew up as one of those kids sitting in my room soloing over other people's songs but I enjoy jamming this a lot more than I thought was rationally possible. I can't explain why but it does me good to know some kid is out there releasing tapes of himself soloing over Alanis Morissette. Here's to hoping the next release has Gerhard soloing over Wesley Willis's song "Alanis Morissette". Worth checking out if it at all sounds interesting to you. And also props to the young label Speed Tapes for throwing their weight behind strange pleasures such as this.