#steamdonkey

Album Review #10: Steam Donkey - Wod Of Gar

A steam donkey is a nickname for a steam-powered winch, a mechanical device that was used to pull in or let out rope.  It was invented in Eureka, California in 1881, and was mainly used for logging, and mining.  With the development of the tractor crawler, steam donkeys became an obsolete machine, and today reside in museums, while many are still abandoned in forests.    

The steam donkey’s purpose, and demise can be seen as a metaphor for Wod of Gar, the second album from American artist Jeremy Cagle.  Call it what you will, experimental, doom, noise, the music on these 8 tracks is here to serve a purpose.  This is a mood machine.  There’s nothing fancy here, no bullshit, nothing pretty.  Its function is to emphasize the back and forth, the  sentiment of our current social climate.

“And What Was I?” opens with meditative strings, a deceptive maneuver to the cacophony that follows.  The rest is a roundhouse of screeching guitars, demented voices, and vexatious rhythmic shifts that push and pull, constantly tricking us, preventing any comfort from seeping through its core.  It’s exactly what you'd expect from a cover that depicts a portrait of a bloody Jesus wearing a crown of thorns (though it looks more like nails), his eyes concealed by the title.

Tension and industrial pounding flesh out these short (but not sweet) tunes.  It’s intended. Spoken word which is irritatingly inaudible (a calculated choice) signals the apocalypse.  

The panned instruments that feel like a bee trapped in a propeller engine in “LFD,” the glossolalia in “Wod Of Gar,” the air raid siren at the end of “Ghoul Scout Cookie,” it’s all done with tact.

On closer “Recoil,” which is bookended by what sounds like flies buzzing around the dead, we get a memorandum: “free yourself from all that is material,” Cagle warns us through what sounds like a ham radio.

He wants to “ask a question,” rather questions on this track: “Are you afraid to die?  Do you believe in God?  Does evil exist?”  Rhetorical or not, one can’t help, but deliberate their own mortality, and the forces that arbitrarily dictate it, in the album’s case: war, corruption, religion, and the inherent belief systems built around these issues that systematically dismantle us as a society.  Do we recoil or fight?  Cagle lets us choose.

Aesthetically the music feels cinematic, conjuring the ugliness and abrasiveness of films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Full Metal Jacket, Clockwork Orange, hell, even Ransom.  I won’t go into specific details.  Go watch them.  I heard that if you get stoned and listen to this album while watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre on mute they sync perfectly.  Insert smirk here.

Everything on this album is calculated, especially the mess.  That’s its paradox. That’s its driving force.  It’s about the search.

Is the tribe in “Lost Tribe” really lost?  Are we the lost tribe?  Are we over indulging in our social distractions?  And how about “Ghoul Scout Cookie?”  Have we, in the Western world, transformed ourselves into zombies, crude machines that are fed beliefs and ideas we instinctively digest?  Are all our social distractions bundled in pretty packages full of sugar?  Does the song suggest that we’re not aware?  I think so.  

What does the acronym in “LFD” stand for: long fucking day, left for dead, maybe licensed funeral director?  

Why “1977?”  It’s the year Radio Shack officially began creating the TRS-80, a desktop microcomputer; the year an oil tanker exploded west of Honolulu, spilling 31 million gallons; the year the US Supreme Court gave drivers the right to not display state mottos on their licenses; the year the first killer whale was born in captivity; the year the CIA released documents under the Freedom Information Act, revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments; the year EMI dropped punk band The Sex Pistols; the year Coneheads debuted on SNL. The song reminds us that good and bad things happen simultaneously.  It’s the cycle of life.  You decide what’s important.

Maybe the album’s not meant to be taken too seriously.  As the comedic, helium filled spoken word on “Another Beer” suggests, “I had another beer and it went to my head.”  This album did the same.  Still, I can’t help but feel that there’s something darker on display here.  And hey, just like the comedy tragedy masks of the Greek Theatre, maybe this album is meant to encapsulate, and amalgamate both genres.

I’d like for someone to download this album (which is free on Bandcamp), onto their electronic device, and bury said device (with a charger of course) for the 22nd Century to excavate.  Will the feelings contained here ring true?  Don’t expect an answer.  Expect to rummage through the debris looking though.  So be it.  Steam Donkey.  Thank you.

SMOOCH-O-METER: