Ass Coffee - If Your Face Were On Fire, I'd Put It Out With A Sickle
(One Lump or Two)
For anyone with a skewed sense of humor, Ass Coffee's album If Your Face Were On Fire, I'd Put It Out With a Sickle (the comma a welcome sight in this age of grammatical laxity) offers much in the way of jocular burlesque. From their name and album title to the amusing Dave Berman-esque cartoons that make up the album's artwork to the Don Caballero-length song names, a spirit of whimsy weaves its way through the visual and linguistic elements of the CD.
Right.
I've never been much for novelty acts. I guess Adam and His Package are funny once, if funny is really the term for that, but things in that vein grow old like Robin Williams in Jack—quickly and annoyingly so. Ass Coffee, however, are deceptive in this respect. Everything about the package would lead one to expect this kind of ephemerally humorous music; however...ugh, cliché cliché cliché cliché cliché: never judge a book by its cover. Spouting hackneyed platitudes. Sigh.
Ass Coffee, mis-genred as avant jazz to their seeming chagrin by a slew of reviewers on their last album decided to do what they could to shake that label. The results, decidedly not jazz, resulted in patchwork rock that lies somewhere between math rock, if only for the hurky-jerky rhythms and calculated playing style, and Chicago-school experimental rock (if there is not indeed something to be labeled "Chicago-school", I'll assume one gets what this evokes). Beyond this, I loathe to say anything more about the album (that is, attribute meaning or such), besides the fact that it's mostly instrumental and extremely well put together—parts flow into each other seemingly at random creating very interesting compositions. Well worth your time.
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