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Southeast Performer
July 2002
by Chad Radford
The Ed Kemper Trio / How To Win A Sword Fight
When listening to HOW TO WIN A SWORD FIGHT one is
immediately reminded of the first time you tapped
your fingers along to the drumming on Rapeman's
"Two Nuns and A Pack Mule", or the first
time you threw your neck out from listening to the
Jesus Lizard's "Goat" a little too intensively.
This could easily become one of those timeless albums
of Steve Albini proportions : Drums that fall like
the hammer of God, tiptoe guitar pluckings sprinkled
over driving rhythms, and vocals that are rife with
scathing immediacy; they're all here. However, instead
of simply reworking these identifiers, EK3 are taking
their influences and reworking them from the ground
up. It's Albini rock - without all of that pesky
Albini - that
embraces their influences, but doesn't dwell on
them. On the production end, it's a surprisingly
clean-sounding recording for such a chunky effort,
that's filled with all kinds of filler in and around
each song.
"Killed For This" opens the disc and sets
the mood for a rather
aggressive listen. A woman's voice preludes the
song, stating: "I'm not laughing at you, I'm
laughing with you." The only problem is that
no one else is laughing. Not yet anyway.
"Spells Devil Backwards," brings an element
of evilness into the mix, and "Scatter"
is the sonic equivalent of a scrape on the knee.
As the music plows forward one could easily drop
other names like the Minutemen, Unsane, Helmet and
Black Sabbath, but again, nothing ever stalls out
to the point of sounding overly derivative.
Throughout the disc, the same desperate uneasy feeling
is sustained over seventeen songs without falling
prey to a dull moment even once. Even when the agro
levels are turned down a bit, the intricacies of
each song are more than enough to tow the line.
"Pain In Sound Experiment" opens with
a disembodied voice proclaiming : "Rush. I
listen to Rush and that's all I listen to,
pretty much." Although it's funny, one can
definitely hear a Neil
Peart guilty pleasure fighting to break free.
"Little Pink Pencil," opens up with a
sample talking about some psychological problems
and is accompanied by an outburst of maniacal laughter.
Perhaps this is the laughing brought up in the opening
track, but again, no one else is laughing. Perhaps
these soundbites were added to the songs to serve
as something much more than just cool samples. Although
there aren't really any discernible elements of
a concept album at work here, other than a general
theme of rage and psychosis, these songs do fit
together a little too well. But in order to put
together a proper concept album about rage and psychosis
wouldn't it make sense to not tie anything together
with anything other than unwavering stamina, disembodied
voices, and unexplained laughter? |
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