I have now been reviewing music for more than 35 years, which means it is somewhat embedded in me so if I head to a gig I find it difficult not to review it, and when someone sends me an album just for me to listen to, not to review, then it always ends up on my list. Such is the case with this one, which is a side project from Matt Deacon of the wonderful The Bob Lazar Story. Whereas that band is the opportunity for Matt to show off his wonderful pronk sound with Chris Jago and others, here we find him in the studio messing about with guitars, lap steel, reverbs and delays to create something he calls “moody moods”. He sent this to me at the end of December just for me to hear, and I can see he had three releases in the two months before that, and two in this year already, so he had obviously been feeling inspired.
There is no doubt that as I get older I am being drawn more and more to music which is experimental and “different”, with the commercial and over-produced sounds (whoever invented autotune has a lot to answer for) we hear on the radio doing absolutely nothing for me, and this is something I have really enjoyed. We all know that Matt has a rather unhealthy relationship with footstools and coffee cups (for example, the cover of ‘Baritonia’ is the stain left by the coffee cup on ‘Self Loathing Joe’) and this project name is of course a homage to 2014’s excellent ‘Ghost of Foodstool’. This is music to be played on headphones, late at night, sat in a comfortable chair with the lights out letting the mind wander where it will (hopefully it will come back). Matt is a highly under-rated guitarist, but instead of creating jagged and Zappa/Cardiac style melodies he is inside drawing out notes and then treating then, working his magic in the studio to ensure we are taken on a journey down a meandering and whimsical stream. This is a release which gets better the more it is played, and I look forward to hearing more from both this and TBLS in the near future.
Rating: 7/10
