Casual Victim Pile: Album Review, Show(s) Preview

Image from Matador

Casual Victim Pile, Day Two and Three
Friday, February 5 and Saturday, February 6
Beerland (711-1/2 Red River)
$5
[info]

To call Casual Victim Pile, the two-LP collection of primarily Austin, primarily salt-of-the-earth bands a vanity project feels kinda rude…or would, if the chronicler of this scene hadn’t beat us to it. “It’s admittedly a very arbitrary, self-indulgent thing,” Gerard Cosloy told the Austin A.V. Club. Cosloy is co-owner of Matador records, and his move to Austin a few years ago could not come without its musical reverberations - not in a scene this spread out but ultimately compact; not by someone who has made his living bringing the tough, commercially resistant worlds of New York No Wave, art house electronica and psychedelic punk to light. With Casual Victim Pile, Cosloy weaves seventeen Austin and two Denton bands into a document as unbridled and messily scattershot as any Thursday night lineup at Beerland.

Casual Victim Pile is a charmingly unguarded document. Lacking polish but not poise, it’s a must for connoisseurs of unpredictable, ramshackle rock and punk uncomfortable with hegemony. The touchstone here is some paradise of freebased early garage rock replete with speedy riffs, organ trills, and Nuggets-derived ensemble choruses. Love Collector’s quickstep “First 48” has an amphetamine pace, swapping male and female vox, and an insistent hook. The scandalous-sounding but secretly sweet Flesh Lights posit a “Crush on You” with a chord progression pulled out of 1963 somewhere, and Harlem’s “Beautiful & Very Smart” is equally shambles and aw-shucks romance; rim shots and a repeating riff underscore the shuffling sentiment of lyrics like “I’ve been looking for someone like you/ You look cool and I like your walk.” The Stuffies, The Golden Boys and The Teeners all walk the same line, though the album also features echoing and psychedelic offerings from Dikes of Holland, The Persimmons and Woven Bones. “Mommy’s Little Soldiers” from Elvis is creepy in both its affected high vocals and murky guitar ramble; The No No No Hopes track “Nobody’s Fool” is a guttural ode to annoyance.

While it all seems part of this and some other time, Casual Victim Pile isn’t always comfortably reminiscent. Oddly a flashback of indie rock’s ‘90s heyday, both Tre Orsi and The Kingdom of Suicide Lovers distractingly cleave to the bosom of some mythic J. Mascis/Lee Ranaldo collaboration. The Distant Seconds, too, take the two minutes they’re allotted only to sound less like their own project and more like a facsimile of Spoon's long memory. And while the enthusiasm of many of these acts is contagious, it’s also more than a possibility that many just aren’t finished distilling quite yet; Follow That Bird! have nowhere to go but up, and tracks from The Golden Boys and The Young don’t radiate the sublime so much as hint toward it.

But Casual Victim Pile isn’t any sort of manifesto or template. To quote Cosloy again, it is a “snapshot of a particular time and place,” and it’s difficult to imagine a more compelling vision of what exactly this slab of Red River is all about. In that respect, Casual Victim Pile is not the last word on Austin’s music scene for 2010, but the first. How wonderful it would be if this labor of love inspired many more testaments, from the experimental havens of the Church of the Friendly Ghost to the bruised concrete of the Broken Neck to the congregations of our house shows to everything else. It’s a time to stop wringing hands about blues-rock’s dopey shadow or the over-glorified confines of one particular extinct venue - be it The Vulcan Gas Company or Liberty Lunch or even the Back Room. In spite of (or because of) Austin’s comfortable ties to the past, everything feels fresh and new and very, very exciting, with so much more to be uncovered in the year to come. Happy hunting.