Wagon Tongues – Shadowrock Destroyer CS
NNF139
You can live in L.A. for 40 years and still not traverse all the fringe boroughs and forgotten neighborhoods sprawling in every direction, no matter how hard you hit the highways. And as long as we’ve been rooted out here, we’ve only had reason to venture into the sun-dead desert no man’s land of Beaumont on one occasion, but the place speaks volumes about the weird water which hometown garbage-folk-chaos ensemble Wagon Tongues have clearly been drinkin’ their whole life. A creepy meeting ground of olde-tymey Wild West relics and trashy meth-dealing truckstop culture, it’s an ideal breeding ground for drifters, criminals, and creative youth with singular visions. Which is pretty much the name of the game on Shadowrock Destroyer, the Tongues’ most recent EP of deranged collective chemistry. The A, “Fire In The Hole,” is a raw free ritual of stomping drums, loops, teen screams, guitar noise, and pots and pans conducted in a crappy basement with black mold on the walls. Confusion is king. The B rises up in a similar cloud of clatter but swings with a folkier gait, sunlight brain-fry chords, dusty horns, and possessed babble bubbling over into a tumbleweed hayride into the sunset. Pro-dubbed yellow cassettes with hand-brushed tape labels in cases with hand-numbered full-color masked band photo cover artwork, and wrapped with a hand-cut patch of brown picnic cloth stickering. Edition of 100.