Unkown Mortal Orchestra, Unknown Mortal Orchestra EP
When you unleash “Thought Ballune” on your auditory vessels, despite whether or not you have actually heard this track, I bet you’ll ask yourself where you have heard this before. This brand of rock has a lot of influences. Bands today are really shattering genre barriers like we have never seen in the history of music and it’s never going to stop. I often wonder how far we will take this business of compartmentalizing, and dividing genres in an effort to label things, until we all lean back in our chairs, take a long cool drag of Makers Mark and just say….. Fuck. U.M.O front man Ruban Nielson has made me more, simultaneously confused and content than I thought I ever could be. Taking funk, neo-soul, surf and low-fi psych-rock and combing them with Grandmaster Flash break-beats and Beach Boys vocal harmonies to produce a nuclear transmutation of noise that sounds like it was randomly selected from the dusty, mislabeled, upper shelves of a Greenwich Village record store. The sound establishes presence in a seemingly unconquerable space, between the tear in black matter space-time, where Led Zeppelin caste Thor out of Valhalla; and the only P&M plutonium fueling station in the galaxy, frequented by Parliament Funkadelic on their quasi-psychedelic, 4th dimensional voyages to Pluto. This galactic voyage is showered with wah-wah pedal distortion, painful and delicate vocal chops, all supported by a rhythm section tighter than 3-inch diameter coupling nuts, tightened by a Craftsmen model 1019 Laboratory Edition Signature Series torque wrench(used by NASA).
This EP would have a colder darker ascetic to it, if it weren’t filtered through an analogue sheen that adds that crisp flowery vintage sound. Because this EP has a bit of everything in it, any listener will feel a certain familiarity or recognize a bit of their own tastes and memories in these tracks. It’s almost as if you and Nielsen grew up together; rummaging through his parents record collections until you both agreed on the best albums available. Except you went on to sell insurance and he followed that child hood optimism and naivety to create something you always wish you had.
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