ALEXANDER TUCKER – furrowed brow

(CD, all tomorrows parties)

Tucker is a mystery, enshrouding himself in a cloak of mysteriousness and mysticism, a broken vision of psychedelia stretching back to the LSD-drenched folk of the early Seventies and to the dark ages of medieval times as well as to the drug-filled backrooms of jazzclubs a myriad miles away on another part of our galaxies, which is just as outwards than ours. The seven tracks on “furrowed brow” could also be read as travel descriptions of seven far out trips that lead through time and space, worlds and minds. Oh yeah, and it is fascinating as hell. Music to fall into or be washed over and away by.

Compare to Sunn0))) deciding to play a folk festival together with Michael Gira or Steve von Till. As you can see, unique minds all of them. Putting the drone into the folk song, or vice versa, rescuing the mysticism of the age old music of the British isles for drones, is a interesting feat and much more than just an addition of the slowly dissolving free / freak folk scene. Devendra Banharts records are already going for 8 € in big superstores, I have seen it. This won’t happen to Tucker I am sure. Substance always wins out over fashion, even if the hype puts the lights on the person available for more interesting photography for the glossy magazines. Well, 15 minutes are over soon.

“Furrowed brow” starts off easy, with traditional albei drawn out and minimalised melodies over a plucked, acoustic guitar. But already in the course of the seven minutes of the second track, the acoustic guitar is slowly being replaced by a dense and droning noise chant. Most songs start out with a guitar-chord repeated over and over again and a melody line that makes me want to read HP Lovecraft again. More revenant and challenging elements are creeping in through the backdoors and make the listener find himself seated in the most uncomfortable place an enjoying himself. Most of them hint at dark and hidden things hiding underneath the basic song’s structures (there, Lovecraft again!) like the disconfigured blues licks of “rotten shade”.

With “broken dome”, Tucker moves into a completely new territory, or rather discovers an as of yet undiscovered desert of space in his musical back garden. Made of vocal samples, dismembered loops of sounds full of reverb and some sinew-stretching clarinets or saxophones he shifts the focus from folk-drone to free-jazz-drone. No more singing, no more understandable words. Adding a heavily distorted electric guitar doesn’t ease the soundscape at all. But it is also the growingly most fascinating place on the record. The sun is shining outside and there are goosebumps running down my spine.

After this culmination of noise it is back to the guitar pickings meets contrasting, conflicting and confining partners two more times. Special mention should be given to the seventh and final track of this record, “pannemaker Doms” and the subtle, bass-heavy blues licks it starts with, which seem to be taken directly from Son House’s “Death letter” and then oh ever so slowly dissolves and evolves into a bass-loaded heavy drone. A hundred years of musical history fused into a little over nine minutes of instrumental music using not more than two notes it seems. If “broken dome” is my personal highlight on the record for the emotional impact it has on me, then “pannemaker doms” must be the general highlight for the musical world.