The description is simple: an album of instrumental guitar tunes circa 1965, something like The Shadows, or some form of psychedelic surf music. But nothing is ever really simple when Chris Cutler, Bob Drake and Lukas Simonis are involved. Simonis is the instigator of the group, developing a series of melodic fragments over which the group worked. His involvement with the excellent and twisted pop group A.A. Kismet may give an indication of what to expect, and to prepare the way for the listener who may be familiar with Drake's involvement with that band. The long standing connection between Drake and Cutler via Recommended Records completes the triangle, and makes this an effortless and powerful group with a built-in history, a great starting point for an instrumental song of short "poppy" tunes.
Of course "poppy" doesn't quite cut it. The 16 pieces are all brief and to the point, the longest clocking in just under four minutes. They tend to the joyous and upbeat, despite titles like "Gruesome Pillow" or "Bloated Janitor," though each manages to wander into unusual territory along the way. Some of that is due to unusual studio effect from Drake's experienced hand, and most of the songs have overdubs from the original studio recordings, done in ways that hide that fact from the listener. Generally though it's just the nature of the musicians involved that makes these compositions catchy yet quirky. Simonis in the melodic lead is the most obvious player of the lot, as one would expect from a guitar instrumental record, and his playing bridges the modern and the familiar through riffs and pop references. Cutler is in excellent form propelling the group with a wealth of ideas that show why he's one of rock's more skilled and inventive drummers. Drake churns out great ideas and provides a rock solid basis for the pieces, his work as a bass player as strong as his more typical guitar work. The songs have a spontaneity and lightness that belies the amount of work and experience that went into making these tracks sound as such, but attentive listening brings a diversity of instrumental detail and unusual melodic direction.
Much can also be said of the CD package as a whole. The cover looks very much like a release from Deutsche Gramophone, while the booklet and liner notes are a twisted adventure unto themselves, involving a canoe trip in the rapids, sackbuts, ectoplasm, theremins and cormorants. As much as the song titles look like the work of Bob Drake's weird imagination (reference The Skull Mailbox) they and the booklet, liner notes and even the band title are the work of Frank Key. He develops a pop mythos for a band consisting of "Bim, Badger and Fishken Terror" playing tunes developed by Lothar Preen "who somehow managed to compose this 16 part work between the 7 hour 'surgical opera' Stalin Cured My Palsy..." Just to set the record straight, VRIL is not named after the Nazi occult society, but rather from a word coined by the Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton to describe "a mysterious life force" used by his characters. Or perhaps it really was, as the liner notes assert, "the nickname given to Lothar Preen by his tough matelot pals in the violent taverns of the Marseilles dockyards..."
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