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Album Review

There are a lot of groups out there claiming in some way or another to be "unclassifiable," with a great many of them simply being marginally eclectic rock bands ("we play rock, reggae and funk. Unclassifiable!"). The Prime-Time Sublime Community Orchestra is one group that truly lives up to that description, and their debut album (), will either amaze you or leave you scratching your head in wonder. Maybe both. This music is played by an actual orchestra, ranging from ten to seventy players, and augmented by computers. Kudos to "Instigator" and leader Paul Minotto for the production: it's difficult/impossible to tell where the natural instruments end and computer manipulation begins. The album starts with the wonderfully titled "Holy War in Your Pants," which combines minimalism, lush strings, and marimba, then gets really interesting when the sitar and pedal steel guitar start trading licks. "A Day at the Mall" is an equally disparate melange of styles. Opening with skittering avant-garde piano (almost reminiscent of Conlon Nancarrow) and Native American chanting, the piece then visits a wonderful orchestral theme that George Gershwin would be proud to have written. It then moves into a movement featuring some kind of Asian zither, and back to the Gershwin part. And these are not harsh jump cuts from one style to another à la John Zorn, these are fully integrated compositions that flow, not a mere cutting and pasting of different styles. And so it continues with banjo, clarinet, country guitar figures, brass fanfares, what sounds like gamelan and sampled cows and advertising all popping up at some point. The group owes at least a spiritual debt to Frank Zappa, one of the early practitioners of this type of pan-musical stew, and that can be heard explicitly in "Erectile Cognitive Bop Bits," whose beginning sounds especially Zappa-esque. Also, the beginning of "Felini's Pickup Truck" is reminiscent of "Project X" from Uncle Meat, with interesting, difficult melodies played by woodwinds over a strummed acoustic guitar before moving into some decidedly stranger territory (this is where the cows and Blue Light Specials come into play). "Invocation and Fanfare of the Tahitian Garbage Fairies" has some nice pseudo-Morricone moments, and yes, garbage trucks. This is avant-garde music, to be sure, but it's avant-garde with a strong and pervasive sense of humor and a clearly defined sense of melody and structure. () is a very strange, brilliant and enjoyable album that should please adventurous listeners with open ears — very open ears.