New Music From Kouns & Weaver, Gauxe
Kouns & Weaver
The Transmogrification of Mr. Claus
(Team Capra)
The new perennial chestnut “Guys, guys, listen, Die Hard is a Christmas movie!” awakes from its hibernation every December to appear on social media, seemingly heralded as a Nobel Prize-worthy revelation and discovery.
Despite centering on Santa Claus, the new album The Transmogrification of Mr. Claus is not exactly a Christmas tale—hence the post-Christmas January 1 release date—but it is a revelation of sorts.
Billed as “an exploration of the last days of Santa Claus as we know him” and a “wholesome little psychodrama / feel-good family comedy for the whole family, provided that everybody in your family is over the age of 18”, the album’s story is surreal and grotesque with an uneasy sense of humor—an epic fantasy with random situations and characters, including Chevy Chase on the set of Three Amigos and an anthropomorphic sun.
Perhaps more akin to an audiobook than a conventional album, the album’s script was written by Zack Kouns, who rapidly unwraps the tale in disturbing detail as the narrator, and the keyboard-centric score was composed and recorded by Rick Weaver—two stalwarts of the “no-audience underground”.
Wasting no time in painting a vivid and troubling picture, the story begins with Santa in squalid conditions, facing the plague and an infestation of mice, attracted by the crumbs left by Santa’s habit of eating in bed. Later on, Santa is attacked in his underwear by a starving polar bear and fills a mass grave with bones.
Throughout the album, the soundtrack doesn’t babysit the listener but offers a constant source of adaptive artificiality, magnifying the already absurd proceedings; one minute, there can be doleful keyboard melodies before going to plinky guitar sounds or demented nursery-room music or moody and tense atmospheric synthetics.
Without revealing too much about its twist ending, it offers a takeoff of the narrative trope where the storyteller is revealed to be the subject of the story, which folds in on itself, easing the listener back to reality from its wild heights, like an episode of E! True Hollywood Story mixed with a Jodorowsky-esque fantasy and a bizarro-world hero’s journey of Greek mythology.
Guaxe
Guaxe
(OAR)
The Brazilian duo Guaxe (pronounced “gwah-shee”), formed by Pedro Bonifrate (of Supercordas) and Dinho Almeida (of Boogarins) carries the torch of playful psychedelic rock/pop on its debut self-titled mini album.
While its inspirations are often apparent, its charm is natural and unforced even when adding unconventional sounds to its pop-rock frameworks.
One might immediately want to compare Guaxe with Os Mutantes; however, Gauxe is perhaps more subtle and less outwardly eccentric.
The opening track, “Desafio do Guaxe”, will immediately bear a resemblance to the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the listener, with its reversed sound samples, Indian-inspired drone and sonic oddities—some obvious and some not as obvious, like the drum beat loop that has been slightly detuned to give it a meatier sound.
It works, though. The word “inspired” comes to mind, rather than “derivative”, and the listeners are kept on their toes as parts cut in and out.
“Pupilxs” offers some of the album’s best pop hooks, pushed along with a slightly gritty garage-rock drum beat and carefully placed peculiarities. The song’s breakdown bridge leads to a celebratory integration after disintegration.
Even a seemingly throwaway track like the one-minute interlude “Rio Abaixo” has its own personality, going beyond a drunken campfire hippie jam with strums and harmonica notes by being warped and woozy, as the track’s speed varies to disorient.
The vague Spanish guitar strums and a regal Mellotron-like keyboard on “Nilo” are whipped together into a spellbinding mix, and on “Onda”, which uses a relatively normal song structure, all the character is conveyed in the timbres of the instruments.
“Avesso” floats a gentle acoustic guitar strum among its breezy vocals and whooshing background, contrasted with the final track, “Povo Marcado”, one of the album’s high points, with a big, lumbering juggernaut beat (think John Bonham on “When The Levee Breaks”) and a guitar-induced junkyard clang.