Enos Slaughter - Saloth Sar
(Sound@One)
Enos Slaughter is a periphery group of some of the best in the US' avant garde groups. Comprised of three members: Marc Orleans (Sunburned Hand of the Man), David Shuford (No Neck Blues Band) and Carter Thornton (Izititiz), they combine in a way that shouldn't shock anyone who's familiar with this group of bands. Obscured, noisy and seemingly improvised, the music rarely aims anywhere specific, but still seems to get somewhere, though by the end of the journey you've been so disoriented that it's hard to tell exactly where you've gone.
Split into two long tracks, Saloth Sar is an album worthy of members of the mighty No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Albeit nowhere as thrilling or vital as either of the parent band's best work, there is easily still enough clarity and precision in this perfectly cluttered mess to make it worth seeking out.
The first track is centered largely around the electric guitar (played by Marc Orleans) and to a lesser extent, what I assume to be an electric bouzouki. The second track is a bit shorter, made up of guitar and miscellaneous fucked electronics.
The guitar figures so heavily into these two tracks that naturally Marc's other band can be heard in the type of guitar playing present. As in Sunburned Hand of the Man, there are no dense, noisy walls of pure noise and sound saturating the mix. Instead there's a clear thread of guitar weaving throughout, sometimes playing a discernible 'part' and other times kicking on the pedals and wailing away seemingly magically turning the guitar into amplified sheet metal or deconstructed to the point of being an out of control feedback buzzing forcibly bent up and down, sounding as if the guitar is being literally mangled and broken. The other two members add enough to the guitar and create the right kind of textures to make this actual sound (as a whole) closer to No Neck Blues Band. As such, it's hard to comment on what exactly makes this intriguing, and what makes some parts less good. But for the most part, this album digs deep into the New York City underground and pulls out pieces of its broken concrete heart.
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