Macula Dog Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?, Kelly Moran Optimist
Macula Dog
Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?
(Wharf Cat)
The NYC outfit Macula Dog has a wholehearted embrace of music absurdity and a self-awareness of its own weirdness, as opposed to outsider-type intrinsically inspired wanderings off the beaten path. Perhaps acting like a low-budget robot-obsessed Kraftwerk, posing the “Man or machine?” question, Macula Dog is a “4-person electronic duo,” which is pulled off by two (human) members Bruce Brothers and Mark Brothers, using the Ramones-style adopted surname, wearing masks and life-size puppet torsos on their own shoulders while performing.
Coming after the cheerful insanity of Macula Dog’s self-titled mini-album on Haord Records is the full-length Why Do You Look Like Your Dog? that continues the group’s chimpy, circus-music style that is simultaneously gleeful yet disquieting, with a bizarre playfulness that helps to set it apart from more “serious” idiosyncratic non-conformist acts.
The album seems to pelt the listener with a jumble of bits, including synth or artificial drum fragments; then the pieces of shiny junk on the floor are rolled up into a ball and held together precariously with duct tape. The four “Dog Food” tracks are brief bursts of madness, holding onto small yet penetrating motifs until they spontaneously combust, and offer the greatest “weirdness per second” concentration.
The vocals work best when they are severely warped beyond recognition, like on the glossy and obnoxious “Lawnmower” or “Work Friend,” which uses pitch-shifting and heavy treatments, infused with a Residents-esque vibe. “New Boys Club” channels Devo’s “Jocko Homo” with its off-balance meter and unsettling call-and-response, sounding like a disturbed person’s idea for the music for a children’s television show.
Macula Dog isn’t low-fidelity, but there’s a sort of scrappy aesthetic to it, sometimes using cheap-sounding keyboards and beat generators; however, everything is tweaked and processed without restraint or mercy, perhaps like financing an Ed Wood movie with the majority of the funds going toward post-production. This is love-it-or-hate-it music; if you’ve read this far and haven’t cringed, then you just might love it.
Kelly Moran
Optimist
(kellymoran.bandcamp.com)
Keyboardist and composer Kelly Moran isn’t one to be pigeonholed, having been a member of the unclassifiable doom-folk-rock group Voice Coils and a bassist for the feral no-wave band Cellular Chaos, but on her new, fourth solo album, Optimist, she seems to gravitate toward the minimalism that she studied during her formal classical training but gladly embellishes it.
Any use of repetitive piano patterns is going to garner comparisons to Philip Glass, but here, Moran adds a few more dimensions, using synthesizers and prepared piano—the technique of adding objects to piano strings to alter their sounds, most notably used by John Cage—as enhancements.
“In Symmetry” opens the album with piano cascades and weaving melodies, atop a bed of synth tones, and it’s pleasant without prodding too much. It’s followed by the dreamlike “Strangers Are Easy to Look at, Loved Ones Are Museums of Brutality” (with a title borrowed from poet Abeer Jay), using chords drenched in thick reverb, mirrored with synth counterparts, conveying a shimmering yet eerie beauty.
The album’s title track is one of its highlights, with Moran’s prepared piano yielding percussive sounds—comparable to the sounds of a hammered dulcimer—that give the notes interesting textures and an insistent propulsion.
At first, “Glacial” perhaps resembles the sound of wind chimes, and individual notes echo with their own rhythms rather than adhering to a strict beat; it’s an interesting way to convey disorder without actually being disorderly, and Moran also uses an EBow—typically used by guitarists—to generate piano string vibrations, adding to the haunting atmospherics.
The mood-setting “Nyght Spel” has a cinematic feel to it and would make a great soundtrack to some chilly, intense domestic drama. Ingmar Bergman wannabes might want to commission Moran for their next masterpieces. (You read it here first.)
Optimist is not riotous avant-garde nor catatonic and insipid blandness, but it occupies its own cozy postminimalist space somewhere between those two extremes.