| The
Review |
If you’ve spent any time at all listening to the various
genres of progressive rock, you’ll no doubt know what to expect
from the good people at Cuneiform Records. It’s going to be
music that pushes the envelope, music that challenges the
ears, but above all it will be music that needs to be listened
to. And that’s certainly the case with the latest release
from Hamster Theatre entitled The Public Execution of Mister
Personality. This disc is really all over the map. And I mean
that in a good way. ***
Based in Boulder, Colorado, Hamster Theatre consist of
founder Dave Wiley, Jon Stubbs, Mark Harris, Mike Johnson,
and Raoul Rossiter with the help of Brian McDougall, Matt
Spencer and Emily Bowman on specific tracks. The instrumentation
is amazing! Here’s a partial list of what you can expect to
hear; accordion, trombones, flutes, clarinets, banjo, marimba,
viola, mandolin, plus all the usual stuff. Hamster Theatre’s
influences are also all-over-the-map. They include everything
from the Beatles to Zappa, rock to modern classical. There
are times where you hear hints of Henry Cow and other times
where the sound is more like Brian Wilson’s Smile era. There
are 13 tracks and most of them are short, maybe one, two or
three minutes but each piece displays quite a number of musical
changes. They’re intricate little symphonies with a lot going
on. As you might imagine this is the kind of disc you’re never
quite sure what you’ll hear next. ***
Let me try to give you a taste. One minute the accordion
is centre stage and it’s like you are sitting in a sidewalk
café listening to a demented French cabaret band. The next
the guitar is the focus and the music is eerie and all minor
notes like a strange suspense film soundtrack. Then strings
on all instruments will be plucked creating a silly child’s
toy symphony. From time to time the band does hone in on a
solid rock style but they never stay there very long, choosing
rather to mine the fields of the avant-garde. Many of the
tracks feature complex multi-part melodies, where the two
or three instruments appear to all be attempting to play lead,
each one going in a somewhat different direction only to collide
together at the end. It’s great stuff. ***
Hamster Theatre’s The Public Execution of Mister Personality
is their second release on the Cuneiform Label and is a masterful
work in the avant-garde progressive field. There is even a
special bonus live disc included in this 2-CD set recorded
at the 2002 Progman Cometh event in Seattle Washington, showing
that Hamster Theatre are no slouches when it comes to reproducing
their complex material in a live setting. This is a disc that
will obviously appeal to fans of the RIO genre but perhaps
more than that, it’s a FUN disc. And that’s the part I enjoyed
most, the fact that it was intensely serious music but created
in a manner that brought a smile to my face. Not an easy task,
but one handled seemingly easily by Hamster Theatre. ***
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