Eddie the Rat - Food For the Moon Too Soon
(Entartete Kunst)
Let's go ahead and clear things up—Eddie the Rat is not a person. Eddie the Rat is not a band. Eddie the Rat is not even an actual rodent. What Eddie the Rat happens to be is an orchestral sound-ceremony. Sounds a little bit out there and potentially pretentious, eh? Well, despite your desires to hear the phrase "performance art" and to immediately gag and/or think of a man pouring milk on himself while holding a skillet full of melting plastic army men, Eddie the Rat is one of the better sorts of this expression. Working around a series of musical ideas and movement created by Pete Martin, the players (Twelve? Forty? It's hard to tell at times...) pick up their leader's ideas, make them their own, and mesh these new thoughts in with those of their audience. The results are precisely what you would expect—a collection of sounds that run the gamut from full-on skronkery to the completely sublime. Indeed, the whole is more potent than the individual cuts, leaving the listener with an album that I simply dare them to drive alone with after two A.M.
As with many largely improvised collectives, when the music is really on, it's cooking. An excellent example of this comes with the album opener, "Matabolized," as it chimes, grinds and bubbles its way through a quick place-setting of what's to come. Reaching the same general sonic territory as Pelt, the orchestra joins their thoughts and practices and creates a very effecting mood. This low drone vibe doesn't hang around too long. Right after a good vibe starts up, the rhythm section starts to kick in and move along on the same page in "Waiting For (Ain't Never Gonna Get) Enlightenment Blues." Structure comes out of the prior chaos and a definite song form emerges. With each progressing crescendo, members of the sonic orchestra hit collective wails that slow down into individual conversations as the music calms back down. This feature is one the only real weakness, to these ears, on this entire album. These distracting and sometimes highly cluttered choral movements serve their purposes in limited exposure, but they see far too much use when viewed as an overall album. When the music itself is as interesting as it is across this entire album, there's no need to clutter and distract the listener. That said, the track ends quickly and moves into a slow-paced whisper. "Food for the Moon Too Soon Pt. 1" is a concise and refined exercise whose thundering drums consistently pick just the right time to accent the building sounds. The tone of the track excels until the aforementioned distracting vocal chorus returns.
The quick "Cannibal" demonstrates the proper use of the vocal work within this sort of music. Wonderfully eerie and playfully delivered lines like "what's the only cannibal that eats itself to death" perk up the percussive background to this one. That background segues directly into the straight-ahead bubbling of "I Ovulate in Mode". "Spiritual Amnesia" follows and provides some (thankfully) one-vocalist fate. The final three tracks return to a primarily musical fare. These final few tracks work very nicely together and create a great free-noise document.
Food For The Moon Too Soon is an excellent example of what happens when improvisational music lives up to its potential. With anything along these lines, there are going to be misses alongside the hits, but Eddie the Rat manages to keep the listener very far above the water line. Excellent for fans of some of the Sun City Girls' more out-there material, early NNCK releases, and/or Tusk-era Dead C.
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