rhinosplode

What I'm Listening To: cLOUDDEAD and Ray Charles

Something new and unsettling, something old and familiar. It's been one of those weeks. Myabe it's the entirely expected (and, at times, hoped-for, both out of disrespect for his career and pity for the burden his family bore while nursing an Alzheimer's patient into the hereafter) death of Ronald Reagan; maybe it's the end-of-the-academic-year impatience I've been feeling for the past month; maybe it's just that I'm way too ADHD to listen to anything that makes sense, but the juxtaposition of cLOUDDEAD's warm jets of cut-up raps and Ray Charles's lived-in country soul have been the perfect soundtrack for the past week.

cLOUDDEAD's self-titled CD is, to eliminate all exaggeration, probably the most f'ed up collection of songs I've paid money to hear in a very long time. Critics tend to compare them to the Residents, and I definitely hear the resemblance. Their songs are disorienting and menacing, but a lot of the sense of unease comes from the fact that they are so damn quiet. Staticky tape loops and gently farting synths hold the whole thing together, as the beats are pretty rare. Meanwhile, three alien-sounding monks rap over the whole mess, occasionally dropping RZA-esque nonsequiters that have a certain twisted logic:

Herbert Hoover he's underground,
stupid underground.
L.B.J. is underground,
super underground.
Grover Cleveland he's underground,
mass underground.
William Howard Taft is underground,
straight underground.
Zack Taylor ya know he's underground,
crazy underground.
Calvin Coolidge is underground,
he's hella underground.
Even big G.W.
yeah you know he's underground,
deep down.

This is the closest cLOUDDEAD get to a club banger, yet the album has a weird forward momentum that makes it pretty good car music, assuming you don't want anyone else to ride in your car with you. I just ordered their second (and apparently last) album, Ten, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. cLOUDDEAD is one of those bands, like (yes, yes) the Residents, whose music is so disorienting that it's addicting. I can't wait to be surprised again.

Meanwhile, the announcement of the death of Ray Charles has inspired me to take out his Ultimate Hits Collection and Complete Country & Western Recordings sets a little earlier than usual. Ray, for me, is summer music. I can listen to it loud without giving myself a headache, and I can roll down the windows and pop the roof in my car and attempt to sing along while driving Connecticut's godawful Route 7 and getting stuck in mall traffic.

There's very little I can say about Ray that hasn't already been said much better. He made everything sound easy and, much like Johnny Cash, was an absolutely peerless interpreter of the American songbook. I hope that Ray's passing, and the coverage of it (wedged between fawning Reagan tributes and the is-J. LO-pregant? controversy), will make people curious about his music and go out and buy some.