SOUNDTRACK: BENEVENTO/RUSSO DUO-Best Reason To Buy The Sun (2005).
I’ve become a huge fan of Marco Benevento over the last few years. When I saw that he was releasing these earlier records with Joe Russo (of Joe Russo’s Almost Dead) I was intrigued.
This set up is indeed a duo. It’s just Russo on drums and Benevento on all manner of keyboard sounds. (There are a couple of guests later in the record). The sound is really full–Marco’s low end is fat and heavy and never wavers no matter what melodies he plays.
This album is all instrumental and there’s quite a lot of diversity in the sounds. Most of the songs are relatively short (around the 4 minute mark), but a few do stretch out.
The disc opens with “Becky” which has a great funky bass and drums. There’s some typically weird sounds from Russo’s drums to start (showing that he’s not only going to be keeping time) and a nice distortion filter on the keys. “Welcome Red” starts with accordion! It morphs into a slow grooving song with a pretty melody that’s accompanied by bells. “Sunny’s Song” is brighter and bouncier with a pretty main riff on the keys and the bells. Half way through the song gets bigger and it rocks harder with lots of cymbals. Smokey Hormel adds some guitar to this song.
“Vortex” is slower and trippier with a kind of ice-skating rink vibe. Eventually the song kind of takes off into an outer space sound. “9×9” pushes past the six minute mark with a slow melody that’s accented by sprinklings of trippy sounds. There’s some really dynamite drumming in this song. By the end, it takes off, really rocking as it segues into “Scratchitti.”
On “Scratchitti,” Skerik plays some horns and Mike Dillion adds percussion (it’s impossible to know what he is playing that Russo isn’t). This is the first weird song on the record. It’s off kilter with noisy funk (Skerik is all over the place). Although it does have a really catchy melody and a great bass sound from Marco. There’s a middle section where things stretch out nicely turning kind of spacey–a trait for this album.
All three guests appear on “Three Question Marks.” It’s a piano-based song and is jazzy in a kind of free jazz, everybody soloing kind of way. Midway through the song Marco plays the strings of his piano, making a kind of harp sound before Russo (and Dillon?) get a drum solo. With about a minute left, the song turns into a manic freakout with Skerik’s wailing sax and Hormel’s wailing guitar both fighting for dominance.
MIke Dillon appears on “Bronko’s Blues” which is slow and jazzy with a 1970s style keyboard solo.
The disc ends with “My Pet Goat” which is a slow jamming song that runs about 15 minutes. Skerik, Dillon and Hormel all appear. The first 8 minutes are slow chords over a fast syncopated drum pattern. About half way through, there’s a pause and the second half of the song picks up with a new slow section based around some big bass notes.
I enjoyed this album a lot and thought it was really fun. It’s a solid record of catchy, but not poppy insturmentals with a jazzy feel despite not being a jazz album.
There’s a bonus track–a 9 minute version of “The Three Question Marks.” This is a big jamming monstrosity of a song. I don’t really recognize the original in it, but then I don’t think the original is all that recognizable. This song has lots and lots of drums in it.
[READ: September 1, 2020] “The God of Dark Laughter”
This story is quite dark and it is written in a style that makes it feel much older than it actually is.
It listen as a report from a district attorney who is investigating a grisly crime. The introduction to the report says
I make the following report in no confidence that it, or I will be believed, and beg the reader to consider this, at least in part, my letter of resignation.
Two boys found a dead body. They were not innocent children–they had been killing squirrels and were covered in blood–but even they were disturbed by what they found. The body was dressed like a clown and was surgically mutilated.
Only two weeks earlier the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. circus had left town, so the D.A. called the circus owner to see if they knew of a missing performer. The owner would check, but he wanted the D.A. to know that clowns have unsuspected depth–who knew what hey might get up to..
Sometime later they found the clown’s effects. He had been living in a cave near by. The cave smelled terrible. Among his effects, they found clown makeup and clothes as well as some intellectual books including one in German by Friedrich von Junzt.
The D.A. went to the library to research this von Junzt fellow. There was nothing in the card catalog for Von Junzt–not surprising for a small town–and no reference materials mentioned him. But there was a word in von Junzt’s book that stood out. When he saw it again in another book, he had to put them together.
With the help of a dictionary the D.A. started clumsily translating the book which was written around 1895. He learned that in Northern Armenia there were two competing cults. The first supported Ye-Heh, the god of Dark Laughter. They viewed the world as a cosmic hoax–the world was terrible but you had to laugh about it. The descendants of this cult grew paler and some believe that the idea of white face for clowns comes from this cult. The other cult worshiped Ai the God of Unbearable and Ubiquitous Sorrow. They also believed the world was terrible bit that you should cry about it. They set about killing all of the Ye-Heh believers.
As a man of the law, he had always followed the principles of Occam’s Razor, but this made him question everything.
In early August, Boris digitally released six archival releases. Volume Five is called “Pink Days” and it is the best sounding of the bunch.
I Just Read About That... 