Ooh eck, best keep this brief as it’s an album that combines the frustrating time-signatures and stop start malarkey of old progressive dinosaurs like Yes and King Crimson with the bonkers-pop antics of serial fruitcakes like Bjork. And frankly it’s all rather messy. For heaven’s sakes, it has song titles like ‘Temecula Sunrise’ and ‘Fluorescent Half Dome’, so what did you expect? And if you thought the Polyphonic Spree were a pain in the arse, just check out ‘Cannibal Resource’ – hand claps, wailing female vocals, folk guitars, distorted guitars and more stops and starts than a learner driver. It’s a whimsical and pleasing enough brew should you find yourself skipping though meadows with 10mg of opium pumping through your veins, and the guitar licks must rank as some of the most ambitious in recent years, but there is simply no way we can condone the use of lines like, ‘the world is collapsing into the universal fill’.
It does have its occasional virtues with tracks like ‘Two Doves’ proving that when the band is prepared not to throw in every musical device and instrument known to man and instead rely on the simplest of string arrangements, the effect can be devastatingly beautiful.
‘Bitte Orce’ is the fifth full length album from the Brooklyn’s shifting emsemble of experimental chaos makers. Persevere with it: verse/chorus, verse/chorus it ain’t.
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