SEPTEMBER 29 – The nice thing about visiting your local record store is that when you make that impulsive decision to purchase a record you’ve never seen nor heard before, the anticipation that precedes getting home and listening to the record is unique only to this experience; no digital download will ever give you that sense of wonder. This is the feeling I experienced when I paid $8.40 for this record. The Monks of Doom. The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. With band and album names (respectively) like that, I couldn’t resist.

Well, here I am now, after finally listening to the record, and it’s nothing like I expected it to be. The first cut, “Vaporize Your Crystals,” starts the record off with a funky groove, with atmospheric synthesizer injected in for variety. Stack on some hair-metal style twin guitar solo action and you’ve got yourself a song. Good start so far.  “The Vivian Girls,” the second song, follows in a similarly funky rhythm, but with a much more austere atmosphere to it.

The rest of the record largely eschews groove-oriented music, and focuses more on an alternative-grunge-sleaze-rock fusion. The Velvet Underground and R.E.M. are clear influences, and the vocal stylings on the album hearken back to Neil Young’s nasally whine. The production is dated – huge doses of reverb make it seems like you’re listening to Cosomodemonic in a huge warehouse, contributing to the inescapable austere feeling. It’s quite the opposite of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” recording philosophy.

Lyrics are unnecessarily dense. This is grunge music – The Melvins, Nirvana, and others were all about banging on things and seeing how angry they could be. This album augments that basic concept with lyrics pondering the essence of life, such as in “Taste of Tendon,” but these subjects are sung about in such a way that it sounds sardonic – a formula Cake would later master in the mid nineties.

Overall, I felt the record lacked serious cohesion. Though I could tell the songs were written by the same group, I didn’t notice any connection between them. Some are more avant-garde sounding than others. Had I not researched the band and this record, I would have said that this band was still looking for its footing, still in the “throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks” stage. This being their second record, though, I’m not so sure this is the case. According to Wikipedia, this is less experimental and more vocal-centered than their debut. If that’s the case I would approach their debut with trepidation.

Was my foray into the unknown rewarded with good music? That, of course, depends on what you would define as “good.” Compared to other things I listen to, it’s ok. Not essential listening by any standard. From a grunge perspective, it’s still just ok, due to the aforementioned profligacy of lyrical content and the deemphasis on angst. At the time of its release (1989), Nevermind had yet to be released, and grunge was but a budding Seattle movement. This record fits right in and as a predictor of what was to come in the 1990’s, was relatively accurate. Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company just needed to find how to piece these predictions together.

-ZS