Various Artists - Old Tyme Lemonade
(Hospital)
For a city of less than 200,000 people, Providence has always seemed to have more than its fair share of oddball artists and musicians. Olneyville Sound System, Arab on Radar, and Lightning Bolt may be some of the cities most noteworthy exports, but an even more teeming strata of music exists on the levels below. Dom Fernow, aka Prurient, head of the Providence-born but now Brooklyn-based Hospital Productions, compiled the music on this disc originally for a limited edition cassette in 2003, but soon found that demand exceeded supply, and reissued the album on CD. Though it features a wide array of harsh, calamitous, or otherwise “difficult” music, the compilation, as expected, centers mainly on some of Providence’s more prominent noise acts, and, less expectedly, on a largely unnoticed but apparently lively circle of grindcore and metal acts.
Some of Old Tyme Lemonade’s best material comes, unsurprisingly, from some of its most well-known bands. Lightning Bolt’s lo-fi “Swarm,” the assault of Mindflayer’s “Dust Often,” and Kites gritty “Pacifist” being three examples. But, just as often, some of the album’s gems come from unexpected sources. The beauty of Seratone’s acoustic “New Dreams” is a refreshing left turn in the midst of the album’s more damaged material, and Football Rabbit’s “Polished Arrow” melds metal with synthesized handclaps better than anyone probably though possible. The hypnotic aggression of White Mice and ambient cosmic patter of Patootie Lobe aren’t similar in practice, but have a consonance in attitude, and that’s what seems to draw most of Old Tyme Lemonade together. The excellent land-mine pathos of Prurient and Knights of Timbre’s hyper, warbled remixing fit together quite well on this disc, and the variety of it all isn’t the hindrance it could be. There are some downers, sure, but that’s the problem inherent to 99% of compilations ever released. Old Tyme Lemonade does just fine, in comparison.
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