Skeletons
(Tomlab)
Genre shape-shifter Matt Mehlan doesn't make it easy to file his albums. If you sort alphabetically by artist, you'll have to puzzle over three different iterations of the band's name, whether the Skeleton and the Girl-Faced Boys of Git, the Skeleton and the Kings of All Cities of Lucas or just plain Skeletons on this fifth album. If you categorize by genre, it's even more confounding. You could make a case for Money landing in jazz, world, funk, electronic, improv, noise -- or give up and put it in the catch-all, other. It's hard to say, track to track, minute to minute, exactly what sort of musical art Mehlan is practicing. The main constants are dense, syncopated percussion, a body-moving groove, abstract, not-very-linear lyrics, and a deep, compelling strangeness.
That said, Money has a stronger free-jazz bent than either Lucas or Git, with surges of discordant horns pushing up out of the tangled jitters of "The THING", a saxophone meandering through "The Stepper a.k.a. WORK", a wonderfully late-night jazz piano snaking in and out of traffic sounds on the opener "Fill My Pockets." But it's show-stopping "BOOOM! (Money)" that slips most convincingly into unstructured jam. At over 11 minutes, it's the album's longest, most fascinating track, a trance-inducing scramble of freeform guitar, roughshod rhythms and occasional intervals of serenity. "Ripper a.k.a. THE PILLOW" has a noisier, NNCK-ish aura, its odd plucked notes coalescing, finally, in forward moving rhythms and a vaguely Eastern melody. All of Money was recorded live, according to the album notes. These tracks, in particular, have the anything-can-happen excitement of improvised performance.
"The Stepper a.k.a WORK", by contrast, sounds more like skewed R&B-based pop, its undulating beat, its falsetto'd vocals loosely tethered to song structure. Imagine Prince walking into a Sun Ra session and just deciding to go with it, and you're about a third of the way there. Mehlan himself seems to recognize the accessibility of the tune, observing in the lyrics that he's taking delivery of "a big box of normal/addressed to me." But normal is a relative concept here, and even "The Stepper" is light years from any sort of standard. For the last five years, Skeletons has been one of pop music's most reliably odd but charming experimenters, and Money proves their value all over again.
Standout Tracks: "BOOOM! (Money)", "The Stepper a.k.a. WORK", "Ripper a.k.a. THE PILLOW" JENNIFER KELLY
