AEM062 Lingering Last Drops

There’s this won­der­ful moment in the British hipster-psychopath com­edy The Mighty Boosh where the two pro­tag­o­nists Howard, an over­weight, bald­ing Jazz nerd, and Vince, a stringy vapid self-styled rave Jesus, are prac­tic­ing for an upcom­ing gig at a local music club called The Vel­vet Onion. Howard has a microKorg run­ning through a wall of effects ped­als, sev­eral test-tubes bub­bling with green liq­uid, and a dead crab in a vat of grease. Vince is bang­ing on a cym­bal and impro­vis­ing a tune­less shaman war­ble while wav­ing his hands around like a octo­pus who has just been exposed to a deadly dose of scopo­lamine. The sound is ungodly, a near-platonic inter­pre­ta­tion of the worst music in the world. Even­tu­ally, the pair grind the track to a close. Vince looks at Howard, smil­ing like a super-shy, zit-covered twelve-year-old who has just mas­tur­bated for the first time. “Howard,” he says, barely able to con­tain his excite­ment, “We’ve invented a new genre!”

I bring this up because any­one who’s ever played music in a some­what self-serious way has had this exact same epiphany at least fif­teen times. The point isn’t that Howard and Vince, or you or I, or that ter­ri­ble ska band at the cross-campus bar­be­cue are hope­less roman­tics ass-deep in their own per­sonal mys­ti­cism. It’s that invent­ing a genre isn’t the same as mak­ing a sound no one has heard before. I could fart into an echoplex and call it sniff-core and hope to God some­one finds it inter­est­ing or hilar­i­ous. No, a new genre is about mak­ing a sound that every­one has heard before, just not in real life. Imag­ined musi­cal futures, invented archetypes…that’s more like it. That’s what Lin­ger­ing Last Drops, a crazy fuck­ing good band from Sao Paulo, are con­jur­ing up in this par­tic­u­lar bottle-tornado of cycli­cal history.

We’ve seen some of the ele­men­tary par­ti­cles of this music before: krautrock, freak folk, ambi­ent dub, Throb­bing Gris­tle, Bob Dylan, Fly­ing Saucer Attack, Dia­manda Galas. But, through some sort of Nobel-worthy exper­i­men­ta­tion, a new kind of micro­scope maybe, or an even larger Hadron Col­lider, Lin­ger­ing Last Drops has pro­duced prophetic and inge­nious records of how those par­ti­cles fit together, col­lide, mark quark babies. Imag­ine if Neu! were the bar band in Twin Peaks, or if the Base­ment Tapes were made in the cargo hold of Solaris with the oxy­gen lev­els hov­er­ing just above zero. The evil in these tracks isn’t a sneer or a leather jacket but a death virus, a mum­mi­fi­ca­tion rit­ual burned in .0000001 font on the back of a sil­i­con chip. Reverbed-out gui­tars, synths that sound like res­onat­ing teeth, drums delayed out until infin­ity, voices that sound like Satan’s out-of-the-office voicemail…you get the idea.

But not really until you lis­ten to the songs. A-side “Love Shadow Syn­drome” hov­ers weirdly on the edge of being pretty, like a girl-next-door type porn actress recov­er­ing from hare­lip surgery. Bendy demon surf gui­tars weave in and out of suf­fo­cat­ing waves of synth pads, some syn­co­pated tam­bourine motif hov­er­ing like scav­enger gulls. The voice here is inter­est­ing too, some­where between a Slint-ian break­down whis­per and a Noc­turno Culto-esque frog burb. Even­tu­ally the whole thing dis­in­te­grates into hiss­ing chaos, a CD skip­ping over the same patch of white noise for­ever, with, what else, a mel­lotron solo over it. I have to say, the audac­ity of that ges­ture is mad ballsy.

“Light,” the B-side, is both shorter and sparser, propul­sive like a bad cough or a Serge Gains­berg track recorded from inside Melody Nelson’s skull. There’s a groove some­where in here, climb­ing up joint by joint out of a snow-covered grave, but it’s so scat­tered, itchy-uncomfortable that it doesn’t make you bob your head as much as squirm in your seat. When the cir­cuitry bab­ble outro comes in at 4:20 like a mil­lion bot fly babies sud­denly explod­ing out of your fore­arm, it’s hard not to seek out the near­est shower or bot­tle of Xanax. This might be the oppo­site of chill music, the kind of thing you might begin to hear if you broke out in a rash three min­utes into a fifteen-year-long, cold-storage trip to the outer regions of space.

There still isn’t really a name for the music Lin­ger­ing Last Drops is mak­ing. There is, how­ever, a sen­sa­tion asso­ci­ated with it at once so spe­cific you won­der how to get rid of it, and so uni­ver­sal you won­der why you’ve never noticed it before. This band makes sounds so uncom­fort­able they should come with a pre­scrip­tion. I can’t wait for the remix album.

Ben Las­man

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