Perhaps a city of 62,000 inhabitants is an odd place to birth an oeuvre rife with a neo-primitivist, tribal bent, but at least Iowa City’s Raccoo-oo-oon aren’t from Brooklyn, which seems to be the epicenter of the back-to-nature trend. Their fractured, DIY psychedelia, is part a growing dissemination of the aesthetic from its urban re-birthplaces into realms in which such use of flora and fauna symbolism and practice of a vague, nature-based punk spirituality seems more apropos, pulled out of the concrete labyrinths into (relatively, in this case) greener pastures.Racoo-oo-oon, though, aren ’t solely acolytes of the new, art damaged hippie sound, infusing their music with abstracted elements of acerbic post punk and the tried and true crescendos of epic post rock. Behold Secret Kingdom, the band’s second disc for Release the Bats!, is, in some convoluted way, considered their “proper” debut, but it follows a stream of tapes, cdrs and reissue cds, some offered by the band’s own Night People imprint, which is handling the lp release of this, their newest long player.
“Black Branches,” as it opens Behold Secret Kingdom, is musical red herring, the loosely-hinged psychedlia seemingly a forecast of further color-washed storms to come. But, as a whole, the disc is based in a surprising amount of conventional melodies and rhythms, warped as they may eventually be. “Mirror Blanket” layers repetitive abuse over a frenetic, eminently danceable beat, “Diamonds in the Dunes” begins with a coiled bit of looped guitar like a blues solo tersely coiled upon itself, and “Invisible Sun” commences on a plateau of wailing horn and bass of which even King Crimson would be proud. Select tracks findRaccoo-oo-oon , under the guise of sonic maelstrom, crafting subtle crescendos, and while the quartet aren't adverse to getting wild, the album retains a level of punk-tinged purposefulness that's not only unexpected, but also easy to miss when the intensity rises. ThatRaccoo-oo-oon are a rock band is often an obscured facet of the music; the brandishing of more damaged sonic wares is a more exciting angle, in a sense, for both writer and listener, though it's this streak of rock orthodoxy amidst the noise that proves Behold Secret Kingdom's most interesting gambit.
Raccoo-oo-oon don't bridge the divide flawlessly, however, and there are instances in which their amalgamations feel forced: collisions of sound that fail to coalesce, layered clouds of sound that would be more powerful if less populated, and awkward transitions that threaten to interrupt growing momentum. Still, Behold Secret Kingdom proves more than once that the quartet know how to harness their freakouts and, when needed, work with an anchor, and while other bands are more than happy to let vocals and guitar run through a delay unit endlessly to the point of annoyance, Raccoo-oo-oon, for the most part, avoid such indulgences via the simplicity of some of rock's oldest building blocks. They work with a well-handled blueprint, but this band is one that's not afraid to leave the forest to embrace more human concerns in a musical realm in which straying from the beaten path might well lead one to more orderly pastures.
