Chattanooga Pulse

Sun City Girls
Napoleon & Josephine: Singles Volume 2
(Abduction)

The trio Sun City Girls, which had an impossibly prolific 25-year run that ended in 2007 with the death of drummer Charles Gocher, never strayed away from pushing people’s buttons—and that includes their fans.  Gocher and brothers Alan and Richard Bishop have plundered countless genres and cultures for their off-center material and had a philosophy to keep moving, keep expanding (no matter how uncomfortable it may be), put the music out there, and have no regrets, knowing that they wouldn’t please everyone all of the time.  The initiated know that there are plenty of treasures in the Sun City Girls catalog, as well as plenty of trash—there’s some agreement regarding which is which, but it’s not absolute.

The new collection brings together several out-of-print single tracks (some presented in expanded versions) and compilation appearances.  Fans of their ethnic wanderings (North African, Middle Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian, Spanish, etc.) won’t find much of that here, and Napoleon & Josephine: Singles Volume 2 is dominated by spoken-word pieces with freeform musical accompaniment, some of which were recorded on street corners, complete with traffic sounds.  These tracks are frankly pretty hard to swallow; “Eyeball in a Quart Jar of Snot” reveals Gocher practically foaming at the mouth with his disquieting story, atop noodling guitars, and the best of these is the manic “A Wake,” which fervently does its business and gets out of the way in a minute’s time.

Half of the album is comprised of the final two lengthy tracks, the first of which is the title track, featuring stream-of-consciousness paranoid musings over improvised percussion, ending with sinister keyboard chords.  By far, the best track on this disc is the appropriately mind-bendingly named “Reflection of a Young Boy Eating from a Can of Dog Food on a Shiny Red X-Mas Ball,” which is a sprawling, reverb-drenched track that is completely indulgent and completely bonkers.  With a roomful of instruments—flutes, drums, glockenspiel, harmonica, to name a few—peculiar vocalizations, and a reckless abandon, it represents the unpredictable nature of Sun City Girls that keeps the fans coming back to sift through the dirt.

NOMO
Invisible Cities
(Ubiquity)

Ever since NOMO’s sonically arresting second album, New Tones, it’s been inadequate to simply call the Michigan ensemble an Afrobeat band, since they’ve revealed expansive influences beyond Fela Kuti—elements from envelope-pushing jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra can be heard, along with similarities to the Krautrock band Can.  The solid new fourth album, Invisible Cities, is largely in the same vein as the previous album, Ghost Rock; however, it further demonstrates the outfit’s eclecticism while discerning an undercurrent running through their sources, particularly through two covers, which are some of the most memorable tunes on the album.

The first is a great cover of “Bumbo,” a composition from the iconoclastic composer and percussionist Moondog; it’s heard here with a brassy soul-funk treatment with a sturdy rhythm section, beginning and ending with horns and saxes in unison that fall into glorious disarray in the middle section.  The other cover is “Ma” by the relatively overlooked Brazilian musician Tom Zé, which is fascinating since it piles on seemingly disparate melodic lines, including an off-kilter guitar part, that work together surprisingly well.

A pattern played on an electric thumb piano—now firmly rooted as an indispensable part of the band’s sound—begins “Crescent,” with a controlled kinetic energy and flute soloing, and it could double as a funk soundtrack for an early ’70s crime flick.  “Elijah” is an oddball track, eschewing tight rhythms for a more foggy approach, using metallic jangles, irregular drum hits, and sauntering horns that casually trace out a melody.

Although there’s an egalitarian attitude on the album, with nobody hogging the spotlight, I kind of wish that there actually was a bit more aplomb with regards to the soloing; apart from “Bumbo,” there could stand to be some extra fervor and a freer, wilder manner.  Still, on numbers like “Waiting” and the title track, Invisible Cities has plenty to offer in the way of killer vamps, polyrhythms, and call-and-response sequences.