This morning I received a package in the post. A black card CD-case with the words KFUM and KFUK in block white capitals printed on the front, diagonally framing six brightly block-coloured animal faces; digital reproductions of oil-pastel drawings with dead white eyes, hovering like bodiless masks from The Shining. Printed on the inside of the cover is a black and white photo of what looks like a boy’s head submerged in water and printed on the CD is, again, the album’s title, KFUM & KFUK and the musician’s name, Lime Headed Dog, both pushed into opposite edges of the circular frame by a hundred-high heap or perhaps a hundred-strong cascade of tiny versions of the masks from the cover; two hundred tiny dead eyes staring upwards. The back of the case is filled by the musician’s name, again in big block white, the copyright and the e-mail address.
The album has just finished playing through my bedroom speakers for the first time, coming in at 11 tracks. I had started it up 35 minutes ago with the intention of skipping and dabbling and sporadically consuming tasters whilst engaged in e-mail correspondence and other menial morning tasks, hoping to prepare myself for a proper listen later in the week from which I would devise this review. But, as you can read, my review has started early, because I was unwilling to either conduct e-mail correspondence, skip or, indeed, touch the mouse of my computer at all, save to stop the screen from dropping-off and hiding the track changes of this blending, gapless recording, and in order to provide psychological direction for my intense listening/uncontrollable dancing (don’t think Jackson, think Parkinson’s).
I am now going through the album again – this time using quality headphones which don’t, interestingly, carry the recording as effectively as my bedroom’s cavity – in order to explain why things happened this way.
This album is weird, but instantly captivating in this way – like a freak in the street you can’t stop looking at. It helps that the first two tracks are probably the heaviest of the album; a true spit in the eye that makes you go red in the face and prevents you from turning off, from backing down. It really is easy to miss track changes also, as track two, Bobby Finscher, demonstrates with its frankly exhilarating fucked-up-filtered-guitar-shudder into what can only be described – other than as Kfum &Kfuk, the title track – as the efforts of a white, bedroom art-pop producer trying to imitate the eccentric cute-synth-dancehallation of Roots Manuva’s latest, Slime & Reason. Which sounds bloody awful, but it’s not. An inexplicably paradoxical accomplishment, like the joke of the similar phrasing: “people say my nose is runny, but it’s snot”. As naïvely crude and unpredictably enjoyable, this album is the ‘snot’ of the aforementioned joke, both the result and not the result of the runny nose of bedroom produced art-pop. Understand? Of course not. This music sets a curse on analysis. You know you fell into it, but you can’t find the door through which you fell, so how do you describe what it looks like and how it opens? Get a grip, Owen, do your job.
It’s all to do with intuition, I think. The intuition that has fuelled the application of experimentation that surely must be this album, and the reliance on the listener’s intuition in interpreting it. Such as with the name, Kfum & Kfuk; we all know what it says, even though it doesn’t say it in the way we would expect to understand it. Which makes it all seem very academic and duuuuuuuuuuuuull. But it’s not.
It’s simple! Boy writes catchy hooks and toddler pop-songs, applies intuitive harmonies and denser arrangement, applies arrangements with varied instruments – violin, trumpet, synthesizer, guitar, etc – experiments with arrangement, instruments, harmonies and hooks with perhaps other musicians and a producer, maybe, and hey-presto! Record it all. Push it around. Re-record. Burn the CDs.
Many musicians work like this, you might say. Perhaps, but few, at least, fail to fall at one of the hurdles – usually the first – and almost none begin with such clearly vibrant pop ideas and come out the other side sounding, although highly developed, as spontaneous as this record does; as spontaneous as laughing in your sleep.
Track eight, Lorenzo, perhaps exemplifies this boldness. It has a video, I think, which might mean it’s some kind of single. Not that, depressingly, any tracks off this album will ever reach the top 10… 40? The album’s pinnacle is a surprise, if there can be any more surprises left. A seven minute, super-high-frame-rate-slow-motion organ chord progression written from the perspective of its title’s subject, Ronnie O’Sullivan. Weird. But an impossibly stirring ending to this impossibly successful record. Almost ending; we break away with one last speedy pop track to settle our nerves from the paradoxical tenseness of the only slow bit. Very cinematic, I think.
I want to write a ‘lovers on the run’ film just to hear this album as the soundtrack, climaxing, for an as yet unknown reason, in the noble Snooker Halls Of Sheffield. This is as English as they come. Eccentric, unprofessional and unheard-of. I’ve given it nine only because I don’t have the guts to give it ten. Make up for my short-comings by visiting http://limeheadeddog.blogspot.com and buying a copying for yourself. It’s the only place where this truly independent album can be found.
