“Electric guitar music is the true birthright of the White British Middle-class Arty Intellectual,” Woebot stated upon the release of Moanad, but it is on Chunks that all its style and attitudes are exposed and lovingly re-posed.
Woebot is a quotable UK critic and blogger, compiler of a much-talked about ”100 Greatest Records Ever” list. As vinyl gourmand, he is the consummate crate-digger; as a recording artist, a dumpster diver with a shrewd ear. When stocking the shelves, file near but not right next to Belbury Poly, Moon Wiring Service, Mordant Music and Sone Institute. While these artists each have their own eccentric esprit, they embrace the breadth of a lost Albion, from the Canterbury Tales to the Canterbury sound, across arable land before the enclosures to the spiritualist get-togethers of late-Victorian bourgeoise, and a pair of black NHS spectacles.
Woebot is more focused on the recent past. His previous release, Moanad, is music playing with music, about which more below. But it is also oral history and commentary on the British postwar welfare state using its own sonic relics—public service broadcasting, leftover Radiophonic Workshop squiggles—nailed, cobbled and duct-taped together like some contraption by Heath Robinson (North Americans, read: Rube Goldberg), with guitars and analogue synthesizers scavenged from OXFAM shops. It’s also very funny.
“Electric guitar music is the true birthright of the White British Middle-class Arty Intellectual,” Woebot stated upon the release of Moanad, but it is on Chunks that all its style and attitudes are exposed and lovingly re-posed. Woebot’s half-hour primer on classic rock and/or roll is indeed very white, very British and very middle-class. But it’s the arty intellectual who tweaks it just right.
All gangly teenage elbows at the start—”Sludgie,” a bricolage of beat music punctuated with a “Mr. Pharmacist” riff, the actual drunken stagger of “Stagger”—it slips into a smooth groove on “Trans-Love Energies.” The power chord is enthusiastically exercised on “Argos.” By “B612,” we have regressed to progressive rock, with the synthesizer beginning to doodle the guitar off the stage. Nor does Chunks neglect to embrace the immigrant hordes Enoch Powell warned your granny about with bountiful blues, African and Caribbean style grabs.
The irony of a garrulous scribe releasing an album with cover art mainly consisting of blank white spaces is not wasted on us, either. No cynicism, no need to worry.
Chunks is available on Hollow Earth. Buy at Boomkat.
Read full review of Chunks – WOEBOT on Boomkat.com ©
