Bloody hell, this is bizarre. You might have read us musing over WHIRLWIND HEAT before, but for the uninitiated they are three lads from Michigan who play bass, drums and a massive swelling Moog instead of the usual totemistic guitar and have been known to chaotically lend support on tours involving The White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They've also been produced by Jack White and nipped into Brendan Benson's Detroit studio to record "Flamingo Honey."
However, any similarities to either t' Stripes or Mr.Benson end right there. "Flamingo Honey" presents a brain-bogglingly weird ten songs all lasting precisely one minute each, thus ensuring the EP/ mini-album (delete as applicable) will be a bother statistically for any chart it would be liable to dent. Mind you, sounding so wilfully oblique, that's unlikely to be a problem.
Actually, the idea of one-minute tunes is hardly revolutionary. After all, The Minutemen often played complete tunes in under 60 seconds and those of us old enough to remember Punk's first (and second) waves will recall The Dickies usually got in, said it and got out in little over a minute early on. However, even outfits such as these don't really prepare you for the curious thumbnail sketches here.
The accompanying press release suggests the ten songs to be 'cohesive', which may be the case. However, 'coherent' they usually ain't. No matter, the end results are quite fascinating, veering from opener "The Bone", with its' gentle, mellifluous feel and Dave's odd, Forrest Gump-style vocals, through to the weirdo overload of tracks like "Muffler" and "Meat Packer", both of which sound like Mudhoney at their most bug-eyed and threatening. Impressive stuff considering there's no six-string action at all involved.
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The EP's frantic journey also recalls several other notable US alt.pop pioneers, not least Pere Ubu (the loping bassline and kooked, buzzing synths) on "No Gums" and in the David Thomas-style lyrical whimsy of "A Worm's Coat", while "H is O" is spazzoid, Devo-ish pop that rises to heaven on a crashing Moog symphony and "Pearl Earring" recalls Sonic Youth, albeit after lobotomies.
"Flamingo Honey", then, is a guerrilla-style dawn swoop of a record that is too resolutely out-there for any kind of mass consumption. To be fair, though, there's limitless creativity involved and at least at times that's enough to captivate, even though the self-imposed limitation of the 1minute-per-track approach inevitably means things get curtailed as you're warming to them. The bikini-clad woman on the rear cover looks scarily like Ruby Wax, mind. Not sure I wanna know what's going on there.
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