THE END OF THIS

THE BEGINNING OF THAT

VERMILLION

POWELL'S FIRST CAMP

NAOMI, RUTH, ORPAH

GAYZA ...

Gaza: He Is Never Coming Back
By Curtis Jensen

4_stars.gif Turkey/Tofurkey
3_stars.gif Mashed Potatoes
2_stars.gif Stuffing
1_star.gif Mincemeat Pie

Gaza, He Is Never Coming Back 4_stars.gif
Gaza possess an inane ability to flex out beyond the fringes of transition: when matters seem most clear on He Is Never Coming Back—when the riff and the pulse and the voice and the content are thundering straight-faced along as mallet-tight as ever—the drums appear as an old woman heading tits over teakettle down the stairs. Then comes Jon Parkin’s decaying hell-bellow across the continental ring of the puke-guitars and the listener is suddenly dragged along in a lightning-slur through three octaves in different directions at once. Gaza perform their greatest work in such transitions, extending the boundary of harmony. By those terms is He Is Never Coming Back an achievement.

Gazanese for “angular guitar work” is defined by a riff grammar that is face melting, almost un-trackable, and for most of its peers, unplayable. The finger-tapping acrobatics of earlier works have been overshadowed by a degree, but only by a degree, a perfect measure of restraint which allows the twisted and fecund garden of their octave-spanning twin melodic figures to run its vines and tie its knots around the knock knees of their pollinators. Jon Parkin is a fucking giant, on stage and on wax; here he sounds better than ever—more grumpy and more taller than you, and more straddle-legged.

Thank God (which they probably do not) that the Gazaites have held together through their recent lineup changes. The ideological content of He Is Never Coming Back is rightly a sector of study necessary in dealing with the record as a total work. But to make ideology the primary horizon in a criticism of He Is Never Coming Back would be misguided.

Two kudos to close, in reverse alphabetical order: Casey Hansen is a mind-wrenchingly inventive drummer whose performances are incessant and who deserves more credit than he gets. The production and performances on He Is Never Coming Back stand up to anything in metal today, which is a tribute to the skill, character, and kick-ass barbecues of Andy Patterson.

UBU

AS SEPARATE AS SEA LICE ...

AS SEPARATE AS SEA LICE

As separate as sea lice in a lonely salmon pen
Adrift in the northern currents of some cold sea,
A pair of parasites, appendages drilling,
Antipodally plunged into a fishy host brain.

As separate as the flesh dressed head off,
Cross linked post mortem, no longer easily
Consumed, batiked canthaxanthinly,
Dubious, upside down through a pinhole.

Accumulating wax on the retinal screen
Of some unseen snuff mill: a lonely pin
Hole in a field at the brink of two gorges
Which lead to the sea, to a drifting salmon pen.

Two gorges coursing over a split stream bed,
Two sea lice antipodally drilling at the host's head.