Flossin – Lead Singer

Take two of underground music’s superstars – Hella’s Zach Hill on drums and Miguel Depedro AKA Kid 606 on laptop – and team them up with a guitar player, Christopher Willits, hit “record” on the tape, and see what the musical results are. Its an idea that looks good on paper but in reality is just a garbled wanking mess.

Most of the tracks here do not seem to have a point to them. Its more of an “everybody play something now” type situation going on: very random and meandering. It doesn’t seem that the musicians are listening to one another. It leads me to wonder at how much discussion went into creating this music.

The songs that work the best tend to be the shortest in length. The songs are listed by number since the song titles are covered in black marker on the CD. A good idea, but I liked it better when Harmony Korrine did it first in his book, A Crackup at the Race Riots.

The fourth track is slightly danceable before breaking down into a noise wash. Zach Hill’s spastic drumming works well in Hella because he has a lot of sonic space to play with, but on Lead Singer he is best when he’s reigned in and plays a simple beat instead of going completely gonzo. Track seven has almost a Bastard Noise/Guilty Connector-type element of a gentle tone eventually being overrun by a distorted blurb that takes over everything.

A record like this has a lot of potential given the pedigree of the musicianship. Perhaps if Flossin played more and got tighter as a unit, this record would succeed. Or maybe the players just have to listen to each other and play off one another as opposed to just plopping everything down at once.