For her latest show Lunartic, the sweetly surreal comedian Lucy Pearman plays the role of the moon. She dresses up in a giant silvery disc and puts on a performance about how it’s lonely up there in space. Various audience members are recruited to fulfil the roles of potential lovers, tickle-recipients, the earth, a cow, a cat with a fiddle, a dish, a spoon… You can see where she’s going with this. She boasts that she’s in control of tides, wolves, and periods and, at one point turns sideways and scrunches her disc to replicate a moon either waxing or waning, depending on your perspective.
I don’t know if Pearman has taken this performance to Glasgow but the moon’s influence on the noisy trio, Taupe, is enough for them to reference it in the title for their third album, Waxing | Waning.
Musically it scans. There’s a sense of tidal change from one sonic movement to another. The interlude subtitled ‘Stride’ sounds like a sea returning to still. Stroked percussion alongside a silvery, droning undertow provides a respite following the almost-nauseating whirl of ‘Anti-Bird-Spike-Bird-Nest, which begins with droned notes interrupted by Jamie Stockbridge’s saxual flailing interweaving with tetchily strummed guitar chords from Mike Parr-Burman. Drummer Alex Palmer improvises a charging beat as the other two lay down a staccato yet rhythmic cadence. And then it all deteriorates, plunging into a garbled sludge that woozes and leans like a pitching ship. It’s as if you’re lying on your back upon the deck of a boat, gazing up at the mast as the ship tips vertiginously from one side to the other with clouds and birds swooping past and then back again.
Much like the cover art and accompanying press shot, Taupe stitch their sounds together in a collage of angular pieces. Some snare shots here. A pumped hi-hat there. On ‘allcapsallbold’ high-muted guitar strings are thrashed with struggling electronics and a meandering saxophone walks wistfully by a midnight canal. It’s all seemingly disconnected, but slowly an image begins to form. A motif called and responded to. These disparate runs gradually coalesce into a compelling, lurching beast, like a chimera slowly gaining control of its constituent parts. Before you know it, you’re in the thick of a slamming riff-a-thon, with the trio locked in sync, thundering along like a right joyous bastard. It’s in these periods, where they let loose the great rabid wolves snarling for your jugular, that they’re at their finest.
If you’ve the stomach for the idiosyncrasies of ZU, Sly & The Family Drone, John Zorn or Earthball, then this will likely click. Rarely does the same line repeat twice. It’s always moving, contorting, changing. Keeping listeners up on their toes. Whether or not you enjoy trying to keep up with these flights of fancy (and they are fanciful) will likely determine how well you get on with it. Those who stay the course, however, will be rewarded with moments of righteous clarity, where everything aligns into a great heaving kaleidoscopic battering ram capable of knocking holes in your psyche, dashing your tender lobes with volleys of unadulterated cosmic sludge. Those lunatics.
