The recently minted Black Hole imprint from Rocket Recordings is a space for those willing to take the darker, less travelled path. For their fourth instalment, they’ve invited Cork’s Phil Langero to bravely cross the event horizon. If you’re familiar with Langero’s Moundabout project with Gnod’s Paddy Shine, you’ll know the rough wheelhouse this exists within. Practical Dancing (For The Modern Man), however, strays even further from the path, continuing up a hill to a handmade wooden shed stood braced against the howling wind. It’s here that Langero concocted his gyrating instruction manual.
There’s a tangible, handmade creativity to these sounds, suggestive of knuckles smeared with oil. The final track ‘Horse Before Cart’ fulfils its nominal determinism by evoking a ramshackle wagon rattling along a dirt path whilst opener, ‘Back Agin The Wall’, creeps along like an even more strung-out version of ‘Nightclubbing’ with Langero’s loose-lipped drawl mustered from the bowels of some doomed whaling ship.
‘Complicit’ finds him clanging away in a darkened basement like a crazed inventor. There are recognisable elements of folk here – plucked strings, sighed vocals, a shuffling cadence – but it’s all twisted and unsettled, with the gentle whomp of reversed sounds providing a rudimentary sense of rhythm and structure.
The mood throughout Practical Dancing… is incredibly murky. Imagine yourself hunkered down, seeking respite from the elements in a low-roofed village pub with its walls heaving with black mould and an unsteady, grizzled man perched beside you muttering incomprehensibly through his tobacco-stained beard. It also calls to mind the various rat-monikered acts you might find scuttling around Salford’s White Hotel, but this time fronted by Tom Waits if fame had never come calling for him. His reclusiveness turning him increasingly eccentric, feral, and more than a little embittered.
Then there’s ‘Single Ladies’, the Beyoncé cover. In a way. Well, no ways. But, if it is, it’s expertly masked in cascading scythes of distorted sound. Like sheets of metallic rain sluicing down in glorious waves among skeletal rhythms. An unexpected guitar god summoning a sonic tempest from great burning amplifier stacks.
It’s not that you can’t dance to these songs – there are impatiently tapped, tinny beats and Lynchian grooves losing their way into the night – but, as they’re loaded with delayed guitars chuntering about like they’ve forgotten where they’re headed and whispered mysteries exhaled in a distant growl of reverb, the sort of unsettled twitching that you’re likely to be doing in response to this is maybe best reserved for the privacy of a padded room.
