Dan'l Boone - Dan'l Boone

When you hear about folks with the calibre and catalogue of Neil Hagerty (of the effervescent, roaring two-pronged assault of Royal Trux), Nate Young (of the unfathomably brilliant, endlessly confrontational Wolf Eyes), Alex Moskos (of oddball cult rockers AIDS Wolf and Drainolith) and Formant’s Charles Ballas all working together, you should be excited. Lord knows I was. Formed with the intention of making the second record in the genre invented by Hagerty’s magnum opus Twin Infinitives, Dan’l Boone have graced us with one of the most engaging, bizarre records in recent memory.

The record opens with the formless grind of “Pasadena Rings”, where synthetic scrapes sit alongside eery horror sounds (a creaky door perpetually opening on a cosmological loop?!) and the groans of the mentally infirm. It’s rapidly followed by the industrial-metal cybergoth strip-tease rock of “Thee Testimony of An Maiden” which offers tonnes of textures for you to sink your think into. Like its predecessor, the emphasis of the track is on flavour rather than presentation: The amorphous, atonal wiggle laid down in front of your ears is set to ‘stun’ rather than ‘lissun’. It left me completely bereft, wandering around in my living room, holding my head and dreaming of an innocent time, a time before music hurt you so bad. They were good times, weren’t they?

“Tampa” is a kinda “Horse Latitudes” of the 21st Century – only this time the poem is unaudible, completely innocuous yet wholly rapturous in its essence. The twinkling keyboard chimes and shreds of white-noise seem to be sculpted rather than played, as though some heavenly body grew tired of incessant radiowaves disturbing their sleep for the past hundred years and decided to do somethin’ ‘bout it. The zombie groans and twanging guitar noise is enough to put anyone off their lunch. That’s followed by “Paper Tree Alley”, which is some semblance of noise coated in dense electrostatic sugar for ease of consumption. I kinda attribute the wholesome production to Nate Young, seeing as his latest large-scale release with Wolf Eyes – the practically perfect No Answer : Lower Floors – was produced in this self-same hi-fi-masquerading-as-lo-fi diamonds-dressed-as-junk manner.

The soothing, easygoing “Mindface” is a tonic – imagine Tangerine Dream having a beige nightmare and you’re close. It’s a spare, forthright track that does little to prepare the listener for the outright annihilation of the psychotic, neurotic, panic-inducing insularity of closer “Hostage Rock”. Over the course of its eight-minute duration, it remains completely staid, rooted to a single thought of paranoiac bliss. It’s also impossible to describe without sounding like some muso degenerate. Go and feeeeel it man!

Basically, the album plays like Throbbing Gristle trying to play Doc at the Radar Station from memory, completely out of their trees on acid (imagine that!). But make no mistake, this is a deliberate ruse: Dan’l Boone as a collective are trying to inspire a bristling, wary reaction to an album full of (largely) accessible, almost easy-going but nonetheless radioactive sonic material. Whereas Twin Infinitives was the album that purported to be the catalyst with which to get all of those stupid, old Pussy Galore fans out of his hair, here Hagerty shows that he’s not beyond teasing his fans into thinking he’s tired of them all over again: Artists don’t purposefully posit themselves in the same zone as their best work to piss their fans off... do they? Grab the drug of your choice, buy this in the medium of your choice, and wig out at the time of your choice. Just don’t let it pass you by – somewhere in the ether Vliet is digging this rambunctious shit-tip of a record. You should too.