Genius band. Deconstructive, with all instruments clashing in a way that is most easily compareable to Beefheart (there are other similarities, most noticeably the single note guitar riffs, the slide guitar lines, the
clean guitars, drums that rely on toms and hihats and almost no cymbals), but honestly, not even Beefheart ever sounded as ... off ... as U.S. Maple does on certain songs.
And, yet, unlike past efforts, the music on here sounds kinda "traditional" (or, at least, as traditional as you're gonna get with these guys) on certain songs. Take a song like "Obey Your Concert"; it moves along with rhythms that feature all instruments locked together in a pretty interesting way... before completely falling apart repeatedly. In time. And then out of time.
Sometimes it sounds like a mess. Actually, most of the time it does. But it's a mess that hints at better things, musically. It's not even that the band is "strange" or "CRaZy", it's that this is one of the few CD's I've heard that seems to hint at... something more. It's not math rock or post-rock or any of that stuff (first things first, it doesn't rock). It sounds like a type of music that has yet to be invented. Where riffs don't really matter, neither do rhythms. The music changes so much that it's easy to get lost in its complexity, yet what's actually being played is so simple that words like "complexity" don't even seem to matter.
Inspiring stuff. U.S. Maple never made a bad album, but I think this is the one they did that's a classic.
www.mediafire.com/?znznjo2ddhx
34 minutes of them recording it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loni6SVagbw