Thursday, January 22, 2009

Foot Village - Untitled

(Oedipus/Deathbomb Arc/Silencio, 2005)

These crazies make the hall of fame for releasing – no shittin’ – the only record to which I’ve ever had an allergic reaction. Foot Village’s World Fantasy 10” came packaged in a large cardboard box, with the vinyl nestled among pine needles, leaves, and various tree-leavings of the naked west. After taking it into my home, I was sneezing and red-eyed for a week, and eventually had to wipe down both the record and the box with a damp paper towel, as they were coated with an air-polluting, pollen-rich film. Lo! I suffered mildly for their art!

No such hijinks with this debut 7”, I’m afraid (am I?), but the band does do a fine job, live on the radio, of laying out the freaked aural-splatter and stoned whatsis it’s been pursuing from “go”: Four drummers, a few screamers, and a conceptual framework that involves collecting info on other countries so that the group can eventually form its own. And even if the kit insanity hasn’t quite reached the full-on assault of later album Friendship Nation, there are some ultra-satisfying blasts of percussion and yowl on “Mexico” that made it real clear at release time that future records were gonna be worth a listen. And they have been! Early-days catch-all Fuck the Future includes these three tracks as well as other nascent tub tantrums, and then the intensity leaps for the aforementioned (and scatalogical) Friendship Nation record and triple-12” Pisspounder drum-band collection.

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