There was a time in my life when I could stay up until 4 or 5 am in the morning, just rolling through Bandcamp and clicking on anything that had an enticing enough album jpeg to make me think to myself, "This has to be weirder than the last thing I heard." And usually, I'd be right. Those days are now behind me, and I miss them. Don't get me wrong. I still stay up until 5 am most nights; I just don't get to sleep until noon anymore the next day. Adult responsibilities- I don't recommend them.
One such oddity that I discovered during one of these furious clickholes of yesteryear was Pderrigerreo's I'm Not Bad. The album is a spastic electric folk album that seemed like it was attempting to pull the mangled body of Serge Gainsbourg out of some blazing plane wreckage and revive him with a transfusion of blood from Fred Schnieder. The album barely felt like it hung together long enough to make it through the first track, and yet, somehow, defied my expectations and lived for nearly a full, additional twenty minutes before collapsing into the dislocated, and strangely Violent Femmes-reminiscent, IMDB recitation, "Actoress Song." The more willful and misguided side of punk has always profoundly spoken to me, so obviously, the hot mess that is I'm Not Bad sank into the grooves of my brain and homesteaded like a motherfucker.
Fast forward to 2020 when I received an electronic message via the crucible of my blog's gmail from PGD World. The woman who sent the correspondence claimed to be affiliated with Pidarre Y Gerreo and offered to send me a copy of their new album, a release with the indecipherable title New Ahhm Uhm.* I don't know how long it took me to get back to her, but my response was hardly delayed, and thank god, because this album is trip, man.
Pudarry Jarryo's members are all easily identifiable, having met at Wesleyan University, but they still manage to accomplish a similar trick of anonymity that The Residents performed during the '70s. An aesthetic approach where who is making the music, their identities, and backgrounds, are all extremely relevant to the music itself, and also, assuredly, entirely beside the point. Such things are intentionally ambiguated, if you will. Being willing to immerse oneself in the slurry of the group's fluidity is essential to grasp what they are attempting to accomplish on this release. Their dedication is transformative of the simple compositions and disparate sounds that make up these songs, and their acerbic sense of humor has the property of an adhesive, fusing disparate parts into an uncanny whole.
Did I mention The Residents earlier? Yes, I did. Beyond the band's disinterest in the kinds of identity cultivation traps that ensnare even underground and uncommercial bands, and PDG's devoted abrogation of these constraints, there are direct callbacks to the spindly, spider bite of the guitars on certain cuts from Duck Stab and the Commerical Album on tracks like "I'm Sweatin Blue," as well as the vampy, overheated organ synths on "I Guess You're Right" and the toy-shark fin creep of "I Hate Your Car." Also, like the Residents's, there is a total dedication to alienating the listener from the familiar elements of Western folk and pop music. The band doesn't go so far as to compare popular music to Nazi propaganda, but there is a loving antipathy towards a lot of these traditional sounds that noticeably percolates up into the strata of conscious acknowledgment, even on the relatively tame Seine-bank waltz "When The Iron Strikes Hot," which coasts on cold, perspiring quality to the otherwise ordinary instrumentation which serves to enhance the swaying disease of the overarching, co-ed vocal harmonies.
Sometimes PDGW narrows the aperture of their colonoscopic filter to only allow a concentrated form of garage and psych rock to escape into the mix, but even these tracks can't totally jettison the inherent idiosyncrasies of their approach as the groovy, drippy shuffle of "Bric-A-Brac Mountain" proves with the willfulness of its accordion flourishes and its tendency to implode into indulgent fits of demented, verbal palpitations.
I want to say something pithy here to wrap up about how PDERRIGERREO's latest release will help you escape from the ordinary or something like that, but listening to their album has kind of broken my usually critical instincts. I could also say that their new album is like as if Daniel Johnston had gone entirely off his meds and tried to make a Fleet Foxes adjacent freak-folk-rock album, and while that's probably true, I feel like what they're doing on New Ahhm Uhm defies even such lofty comparisons. Will this album change your life for the better? Probably not. Is it extremely bizarre? Yes. Is experiencing something completely out of the ordinary good for you? In my experience, I believe so, and if that's not a sufficient basis to recommend a record on, then I quiet. Listen to this record.
*Note: This is sarcasm. Just sound it out.
Get a copy of New Ahhm Uhm here.
