TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN L.A.
Noon and Eternity
Menlo Park Recordings
· Free-rock veterans add some big names to the roster, yielding a mesmerizing new album.
For well-on 20 years now, Tom Smith has been hanging by his fingernails off the noisiest edge of rock ’n’ roll, as part of ’80s rock brutalists Peach of Immortality and To Live and Shave in L.A. (TLASILA), now in its third lineup, (and damn, it's a hell of a lineup). For Noon and Eternity, Smith is joined by TLASILA co-founder Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Mark Morgan of Sightings and Andrew W.K. (yeah, one and the same – he was in Wolf Eyes too, ya know). The injection of fresh blood into the group has resulted in the most fascinating TLASILA effort to date.
The TLASILA formula (if there is such a thing) centres around queasy electronics, guitar, bass and sawtooth keys pushed into the red, straightforward, monumental drumming and Smith's melodramatic and gripping vocals, howling his obtuse lyrics as the group's sprawling morass of sound teeters on the edge of explosion. The 25-minute opener "This Home and Fear" sets a foreboding tone for the rest of the album, replete with allusions to horrors borne of war and disease that are nailed home by the sleeve's photos of Oscar Perez's witty and disturbing sculpture "Civic Duty."
Strangely, Noon and Eternity has a parallel with the first TV on the Radio EP, not because of superficial similarities, but rather because both releases foster immense tension without release. Noon's four tracks (the shortest of which is 10 minutes) build and build, piling element after element atop each other until everything sways dangerously back and forth, but the expected crash and topple never comes and the album is better for it. Closer "Mothers Over Silverpoint" is the best example of this, melancholy keyboards winding tight spirals around a steady percussion pulse while Smith's harrowing vocal batters and buffets them, as if daring the song to collapse. An endlessly interesting piece of uneasy listening.
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