Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Lougow - Dull Thicket





















(Ozark Level Full View Records, 2011)

RIYL = Danielson, Thomas Function, Bird Names

This isn’t violent music (at least in any traditional sense), but I can’t help thinking of maligned things and things used to malign them with when figuring out how to describe Dull Thicket. Bedside drawers filled with dull knives. Loose guitar strings for cutting off circulation with. Pointed elbows and sharp-knobbed fists. True, this isn’t the overbearing type violence-rhetoric you find attached to metal or harsh noise music, but a kind of sparse backwoods-type danger that is quasi-poetic, thrilling and potentially horrific.

Let’s stop there.

At least lets stop that line of thought. Lougow isn’t lyrically morbid and, while it maintaining elements of dissonance, is not overtly harsh. In a base sense this is pop music (a term that has grown fat and useless). More specifically, Dull Thicket has strings the spread to natty, schizo-twee, freak folk and folk-punk. It’s definitely energetic music, restless music, music that is twisted and ever twisting, moving, evolving.

And I don’t think there is a possibility of listening to Lougow and not hearing a connection to Danielson.  (Though, if you were nonplussed by The Best of Gloucester County, Dull Thicket is a lush alternative.)

At the end of the day, Dull Thicket is wild pop music with a dangerously punk aesthetic; a frisky album that’ll likely wind up jailed for the freewheeling damage it causes, which is why you should be listening to it right now.

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