Del Rey & The Sun Kings
Battleship Potemkin (CD & DVD)
17 Pygmies
13 Blackbirds (Double CD)
The return of '80s L.A. underground fixture Jackson Del Rey (AKA Philip Drucker) has been welcome. Known for his membership in Savage Republic, Del Rey eventually split off to pursue 17 Pygmies, and is represented on LPs by both. Dropping out for 15 years, he resurfaced two years ago with the solo I Am the Light. And from these two releases, both out a while (apologies, I missed them before), and two more out now, he is even more prolific than he was.
Battleship is his most fascinating work ever. A new score for early USSR director Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 propagandist masterpiece of early cinema, it reinvigorates the instrumental music backing the historical tale of 1905 revolutionary mutiny against Tsar Nicholas II's naval officers, and the Odessa street massacre that followed. The music is repetitive, circular, and full of tones in sequential, near -Eastern drones, the bed for orchestral lines lined on top. (Great example: "All for One and One For All"). It's impossible not to visualize the movie's slaughter, new to cinema, when hearing the death knells and terrified synths of "Suddenly...The Czarist Soldiers" - even if you just listen to the CD. But watch the DVD instead, it's an incredible movie(!), and like Tom Verlaine's recent solo guitar soundtracks for pre-talkies, you get the full effect of the aural massage. Otherwise, even on CD, Del Rey's work is like a film in of itself, sparking wild imagination. Good pressed cardboard sleeves for both, too.
As for 17 Pygmies return after 17 years gone (fitting), this finds Del Rey picking up not where early, well-admired, more clashing works such as Jedda By The Sea left off, but more later works with lovely voiced Louise Bialik such as 1988's penultimate Welcome (only without that LP's breaks). The backgrounds are playful, just as full of an unnoticed lushness, and (again) repetitive backgrounds underneath Bialik's cooing. Few groups manage such immediate songs with such artistic backing tracks, yielding new possibilities and sounds every time you delve deeper into them. Only a faithful, hidden bonus cover by Paul McCartney's White Album Beatles acoustic track "Blackbird" is exactly what it seems on first blush. (The second disc is 13 remixes of one song, "Lotus" - highly creative, though way too exhausting. Another artful pressed sleeve too.)
As we went to press, Del Rey completed a new soundtrack, this time for F.W. Murnau's 1922 vampire horror classic Nofseratu, and a new LP under the modified name The 17th Pygmy. Wanna bet they are both inspired, too? (trakwerx.com)
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