Party Dozen make an unbelievable racket. I don't mean that in any pejorative sense, but I do mean it literally. I'm bewildered by what I'm hearing on The Real Work, their third album. All I'm sure of is that it does, in fact, work. My synapses turning into a firework display in response to the arrays of parps, hooles, feeps, grauls, and all manner of exceedingly ominous clangor that they disgorge over the course of the album is proof that whatever they are doing, they have tapped into something both real and uncanny. At its base, Party Dozen is one man (Jonathan Boulet), posed behind a drum kit, which he hammers like a grudge, and one woman (Kirsty Tickle), a solo saxophonist, whose retorts and replies, to the percussive knots that bind these songs together, resemble someone raising the alarm of an impending industrial mishap through a shattered megaphone. A rock, or jazz, or composition recital, featuring only two performers is nothing out of the ordinary, but the sounds Party Dozen muster together are just so devastatingly anomalous, rudimentary in their bludgeoning grandeur, and unaffectedly transcendental that they don't truly feel of this world; despite their unmistakable physicality and weighted material presence. Like no wave, as blood sport. Like Metal Machine Music, but intimidatingly coherent, and maddeningly intelligible. Party Dozen are like if John Zorn parachuted unannounced into a Lightning Bolt set at Taicoclub and started using his sax to spar, gladiator style, with Brian Gibson and his bass. Such incredible collaborations (confrontations?) are not as challenging to imagine as one might think. In one of The Real Works's early highlights, Nick Cave makes an unobtrusive cameo muttering and then shouting a variation of the title "Macca the Mutt," crooning with full, desperate Grinderman charisma as if he was being dragged away by men in white coats during the song's coda. Soon after, "Fruits Of Labour" presents a low-riding sax groove as if it was the jaundiced sweeping gaze of a clandestine operative on the lookout for a surreptitious drop from one of his underground contacts, then the song gets ugly, and suddenly the g-man realizes that someone must have slipped something into his coffee, and everything is covered in silty dry moss, and he is sinking, sinking, sinking, as if the ocean were flooding through the windows of his convertible, forcing him below the surface of the pavement and into a briny tomb. Mutilated and opaque protests struggle below rising waves of thunderous bass and edifying sax wails, amplifying the form, if not the substance, of the many galvanizing objections that spur and parry within the cage of "The Worker," elsewhere "Major Beef" has all the black majesty of a Coven performance at the band's theatrical height and sounds like it is echoing up from an orchestra pit dug into the frozen shores of Cocytus, while still later, the band returns to their penchant for semi-surf rock abstraction on "Earthly Times" sounding something Dick Dale might have written after an encounter with an Old One. The Real Work, as the product of Party Dozen's brow sweat, leads me to hazard that they are exuding something stronger than lysergic acid from their pores.
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