Grumbling Fur...possibly named after a chapter in the Pooh series

My friend Bill Meyer says that if he hates the band name, he almost always hates the band. A band that can't think of a good one or two word handle for itself is unlikely, he says, to have the intelligence and creativity to write a good song. Fair enough. But with exceptions. Grumbling Fur, for instance, is a cloying and awful band name. It is also a pretty good band (if "band" can be made to stand in for an occasional, loosely structured, two-man collaboration) with an excellent record out in Glynnaestra. I reviewed it last week for Dusted.

I said,

"Grumbling Fur is a one-off experiment that took root, a super group of unknown musicians. It started with a day-long jam in 2011 that brought together avant stalwart Alexander Tucker, epic art-rock multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan (of Guapo, Aethenor and Mothlite), Jussi Lehtisalo from Circle and Dave Smith (also of Guapo), and resulted in an LP called Furrier. There was another record in 2012, called Alice. It was also recorded live and on the fly, this time just Tucker and O’Sullivan.

Glynnaestra has much of the sweep and mystery of Furrier as well as the close, lovely minor-key harmonies of Alexander Tucker’s solo folk work. As in Tucker’s Imbodogom, ordinary noises like speech, tea kettles, hand claps are worked into surreal and dream-like patterns. Instruments, too, are both recognizable and slightly altered, the jangle of guitar and harp blossoming into otherworldly overtones, the notes of piano dissolving like food coloring into an amorphous pool of inchoate sounds. Yet it moves in a way that neither Imbogodom’s recordings nor Furrier ever did — playfully, lightly, but purposefully."

More

Grumbling Fur - The Ballad of Roy Batty from Michael Lewis on Vimeo.

Grumbling Fur...Alexander Tucker's new thing

Very much enjoying Alexander Tucker's new project Grumbling Fur, which is more urban and pop sounding than his psych-folk solo work, but just as mysterious and beautiful. In Grumbling Fur, he works with Daniel O'Sullivan, whose other projects include Guapo, Ulver, and Æthenor (with Stephen O’Malley). Anyway, still kind of struggling with workload issues, but thought I'd share this soundcloud sample.

Alexander Tucker

I think I posted, a while back about liking Alexander Tucker's Dorwych and I know I reviewed the first Imbodogon record a year or so ago. Here's his latest the not-quite-folk, not-quite-experimental-drone Third Mouth, which I liked very much....

Alexander Tucker
Third Mouth
Thrill Jockey

Alexander Tucker constructs surreal landscapes out of the most natural materials: shifting major-to-minor key guitar patterns; the throb and drone of cello; a high, supple tenor that moves easily along melancholy, modal paths. Bits of synthesizer, found sound and electronic enhancements lurk in the crevices of these songs, but do not account for their essential strangeness. Tucker, on this sixth solo full-length, has a transcendentalist’s eye for the spiritual within the material. The Third Mouth of this album’s title comes from Tucker’s mother’s occasional tendency to speak in tongues, and the juxtaposition of the homey and familiar (mom) with the inexplicable (religious transport) runs through these nine songs.

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There doesn't seem to be anything from the new album on Soundcloud, but they've got a song from Dorwych, which will give you an idea.

Alexander Tucker

A while back, I reviewed an album by an outfit called Imbodogom, a cross-continental collaboration between UK-based alternative folkie Alexander Tucker and New Zealand-born noise experimenter Daniel Breban. You can read my review of The Metallic Year here, if you like.

Warning, though: it won’t help much with understanding Alexander Tucker’s new solo disc, Dorwytch, a strange and beautiful excursion into the more acidy realms of British folk, a bit proggier than the obvious name-checks (Incredible String Band, Syd Barett), and just a touch reminiscent of earlier Genesis. Anyway, it’s really good …another winner from Thrill Jockey.

I’m not sure why I didn’t review it, except that you can’t review everything. Here’s a bit, the opening song, which has a nice string-assisted tension to it, but I really like the more translucent cuts near the end of the album better.

“His Arm Has Grown Long”

Let see, that's two Alexanders in two days, have to try something different tomorrow.

Imbogodom

I reviewed a very nice noise-electronic-improvisational-type album from Imbogodom, a collaboration between Alexander Tucker and Daniel Breban last week...and it ran last week at Dusted.

A bit of the review...
More like one, long piece with movements than a series of freestanding compositions, The Metallic Year traces a conversation between organic, instrument-based sounds and electronic manipulations, improvisation and tape manipulation. Often lovely, occasionally dark and foreboding, the album seems to encapsulate the tenor of post-terror times, a thread of worry running through even the most serene landscapes.



The rest of the review is here:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5917

I can't find any mp3s but there are previews of all the tracks at the Thrill Jockey page
http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/index.html?id=104957

(the embedded links feature doesn't seem to be working with my parents' computer, so I'm just putting in the URLs for now.)