DAMAGED BUG - Cold Hot Plumbs

A second voyage for the Damaged Bug side-vessel wasn't exactly planned, but given the clear creative transmutation its pilot, John Dwyer, was going through, it must have become an evident necessity. Barely a year has passed since “Hubba Bubba“, the umpteenth solo debut from the San Francisco rocker, and his Castle Face label already has a sophomore effort ready in the catalogue - one far less reckless or disposable than that first episode, which we'd taken for little more than an off-the-cuff (and self-indulgent) toy.

This time around, Dwyer's explorations are as playful and refined as those of Stereolab, with “Dots And Loops” serving as a looming reference point (“Grape Basement”, “Transmute”) alongside the more obvious Can and early Brian Eno (already openly namechecked, incidentally, on the cover of the previous record): fewer spineless jokes, then, less unchecked autism, and more fully realized transcriptions of his own songwriting into a form that is finally free, fluttering, sinuous and recurring. “Cold Hot Plumbs” is an exercise in electronics that finds its driving impulses as much in pop as in kraut-rock, yet never gives up on stirring in the subtle psych unease that made Thee Oh Sees such a reliable proposition, along with that bizarre, happily childlike streak which, for the Californian, clearly remains a need that can't be silenced.

As the single "Jet In Jungle" shows, the noir tone has turned light and playful, with more structure and less sterile improvisation. This way, our man manages to speak with a genuinely new voice that dodges rigid genre constraints, without necessarily retreating into the lo-fi synth-pop caricature one might expect from him, were he to fully indulge his boundless weirdness.

The evocative passages that recall his most celebrated creature are numerous and particularly convincing ("Der Mond", "The Frog"), amid atmospheric phrasing, lysergic break-ins (the radiant sunshine in the chorus of "Cough Pills"), endearing robotic inflections and spacey drifts that, very wisely, never overdo it, instead maintaining a surprising balance of ideas. This way, the record manages to entertain and dispense all its freeze-dried fascinations at once, without sinking into the shabby farce of so much hypnagogic showing-off, but also without ever taking itself too seriously.

From its very title, "Cold Hot Plumbs" proves to be an album with a weakness for antinomies, albeit tastefully harmonized, steering clear of noisy solutions and making good use of a fine array of vintage effects, gurgles and burbles, liquid, rubbery, crackling textures. The original garage sound is transfigured into a deranged recoding that smacks of playful futurism, at times infatuated with a recycled funky aesthetic, more often with a genial minimalism made of endless onomatopoeic modulations.

It's just a moment of recreation set against the uninterrupted tour de force of his main project. Still, it's easy to appreciate, and in the future we might even find, who knows, that we no longer want to do without it.

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25/08/2016