Dark Meat
When the Shelter Came EP
Rating: 3.0/5.0
Label: Emergency Umbrella
Think back long and hard to your days as a college freshman; can you remember smokin' a doob, watching Easy Rider in someone's dorm? Do you remember when Captain America and Billy, upon taking their hitchhiker to his destination, stop in at this hippie commune for some free love and a meal? If so, you might recall that 360° shot, circling around at those disheveled faces as some New Agey blessing is said over some homegrown granola. Remember thinking, "Like, wow, man. My parents' generation woulda shoulda coulda with the whole back to earth thing. Me, I don't know where I'd be without my Napster and student loans." Don't sweat it, man, as the Athens, Georgia ensemble Dark Meat kind of look like that collection of heads, were they not too stoned out to record Beefheart-ed jams.
Dark Meat (a shortening of the evocative Dark Meat Vomit Lasers Family Band) has singer and guitarist Jim McHugh and bassist Ben Clack teaming up with a host of cohorts, including singing back-up ladies, the Subtweeters, as well as a raucous horn section. Releasing When the Shelter Came as a taster for a full-length fall record, picks up from their previous Universal Indians. The EP's title track is a perfect encapsulation of the band's delights. Over a warm, overdriven electric guitar whose amp must glow visibly with vacuum tubes, McHugh sings with a vocal style that (if you'll forgive me the belabored constellation attempted next) sounds like Iggy impersonating early Arthur Lee, who was initially hung up on sounding like Roger McGuinn.
Nothing else on the disc comes close to "When the Shelter Came," which ends its verses on bizarrely triumphant horn blasts; through all the lo-fi mud, the brass sounds otherworldly and powerful. Were this not enough, the final verse is punctuated with the beautifully ear-piercing multi-tracking of the Subtweeters harmonizing into the red; horns re-emerge, this time with flute, and drummer Jason Robira taps out a martial beat while the brass attempts a sort of Forever Changes grandiosity. "The Faint Smell of Moss" is pleasant enough, if not as striking, "Last of the Frontiersmen" is competent, and "New Millenium Prayer II" is basically 50 unnecessary seconds.
The final track, the sing-along, jam-along "Retards on Acid," is the unfunny punch line. I'm not offended by the word as much as I am by its tunelessness and it's inclusion here; it sounds like an in-joke toss-off recording of a wild practical joke from some party five years ago you weren't invited to and didn't attend. Dark Meat sounds aimless here, like a sunny, less spooky Entrance. Though I get the impression that Guy Blakeslee probably does read Crowley in his spare time, Dead Meat seem entirely too clever to buy the freak folk business wholesale; "Retards" is a little too self-aware of their climbing through the '60s cultural detritus and is almost as self-indulgent, if not earnest, as, say, The Celebration of the Lizard.
by Chris Middleman