Brunswick 1972 / Think Like A Key 2026
When the medium is the message, tedium can’t be part of collective consciousness, as proven by one-off opus from an obscure Chicago band – a highly accessible and highly wired, if weird, work.
Anomaly
As a rule, experimental records, no matter how avant-garde they are, are just that – records of their period, and such documents rarely stand the test of time – yet, living up to its title, “Anomaly” exists beyond any temporal constraints while reflecting on the past and the future of the USA. This album could have been created nowhere else but in the USA, although none of the platter’s four mini-epics sound as philosophical or satirical as those by, respectively, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION; still, McLUHAN, never strangers to sonic collages, molded their opuses in the British jazz-rock fashion, an approach which, combined with Bruce Swedien’s ingenious engineering, helped it all inhabit eternity. It’s all about cultural shifts, as the compositions’ constant movements suggest, and mapping out the sophisticated twists and turns to lay down in just three days might stretch lesser mortals’ fancy thin – only what the Illinoiseniks came up with is stylistically and melodically rich.
It’s rich enough to get plucked from oblivion and shock and delight the listener, if just for half an hour, more than fifty years later, and nothing will serve this goal better than “The Monster Bride” which touches on many a cinematic cliché – up to the “20th Century Fox” fanfare – and delves into them in an orchestral fashion, with brass at the fore, courtesy of the band masterminds Paul Cohn and David Wright. Building up from the bedrock of Tom Laney’s church organ, it creates a disturbingly magnificent soundscape that’s punctuated with the delicate rumble of Neal Rosner’s bass and ruffled with the sharpened riffs of Dennis Stoney Phillips’s guitar, ready to be transformed into a fairground drama, driven by John Mahoney’s imaginative drumming, and then go off on a variety of tangents – unhinged, especially when vocal harmonies hit, yet arresting in every single detail. As lyrics are introduced in the second part of the piece, piano-rippled romantic sentiments render the unexpected folk balladry, set against a majestic backdrop, irresistible, and the lines of spoken word, reserved for the finale, deliver a tasty blow to one’s psyche.
Whereas “Spiders (In Neil’s Basement)” seems more customarily idiosyncratic in its social critique – steeped in trad jazz, spiked with samba and stricken with klezmer motifs, the mélange redolent of a Prohibition-era juke joint – elevated by a drunken choir, the audience is not spared from further forays into darker recesses of soul. So once “Witches Theme And Dance” proposes a series of instrumental passages, which venture first from a belligerent march to a spaced-out dirge and then to a free-form elegy, painting a progressive-rock panorama and switching between battlefield vigor and pastoral acquiescence that could challenge "Valentyne Suite" in their cosmic scope, the sheer boldness of this ensemble should be impossible to ignore. Still, opposing the dream elements permeating the initial three quarters of the record, the quadripartite “A Brief Message From Your Local Media” emerges as though court of the Crimson King relocated to the States and got real despite the magic flute casting a tuneful spell.
As gloom and grooves conspire to transport a sonic spectator to “The Garden” of the present, a sobering snippet of history is offered in “The Assembly Line” to bring into focus the importance of Henry Ford’s industrial genius and let “Electric Man” pour forth the lush slush of pure-’70s funk, leaving “Question” to hang on as the sweet-and-pungent aftertaste. A brilliant illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s theory and a guide to the extensions of man, “Anomaly” retained its allure, and there’s a hope the recently reunited McLUHAN may one day deliver a sequel to their masterpiece.
*****
