★★★★☆
Comparing any record to a puddle of vomit may seem like the vilest insult around, but in the case of Mangelwurzel’s very goodGary, it’s the only quantifier that seems to stick.
This is a technicolour yawn of an album; a delightfully crude stew of semi-digested concepts that somehow reaches both new lows and ecstatic, dizzying highs at the same time.
Sure, it may occasionally veer a little too close to the domain of the trifle and the trite – ‘My House’ is a misstep, and the bong bubble that starts ‘Glorious’ reeks of a high schooler’s impression of what anarchy sounds like – but on the whole, this is a relentlessly original work. It’s an exercise in bad taste that somehow feels like high art, like a trash fire in the Louvre.
The wail of the saxophone defines the record as much as the Robert Crumb-esque lashings of weird sex and arch cheekiness, and though the squeaky jazz-punk stylings of a song like the title track or the debauched ‘Everybody’s Friend’ owe a lot to James Chance and his Contortions, there’s a manic energy to the piece that belongs solely to Mangelwurzel.
Gary is delirious, unbridled, horrific fun: like an axe murder in a school for clowns, or an inferno in a puppy farm, or yes, a steaming puddle of your beloved’s vomit.
Mangelwurzel’sGary isindependently released and available here.
