LISTEN to a sample of Raw Thug’s “Sugar Pills” cassette tape HERE
Raw Thug expects the impossible from his music. Carefully selecting his weapons like well-manicured tape ninja and spooling their sparks together, the man starts/stops herks/jerks like a NYC taxi driver yet never fucks his passengers around. I’m not sure what it all means, but I’m fascinated enough to want more. It’s too bad, from the sound of it, that there are few releases to Thug’s name (though he’s got a CD-R on U-Sound and also releases under the moniker Arsenio).
Wielding experimental rock is like brandishing a light saber: If you unsheathe it, you’d better get on with usin’ it PRONTO, not to mention that you’d better employ it properly. There are all manner of unspoken pitfalls and lines to be crossed, obstacles that cause many noise/improv/synth/etc. records to fall flat; you listen to them once, melt them down and hopefully smelt them into something useful. In the meantime, however, what you’ve got is a wasted opportunity — don’t forget that these objects cost money and time to make — to forge increased unity with your underground brethren.
Raw Thug manufactures unity through disjointedness, a tough trick to pull. It’s like a collection of between-song skits spliced together, stretched out and pounded flat as a beaver pelt. I could never imagine seeing this material performed live, not because it wouldn’t be interesting but because all I can think about while it’s playing is morphine days, Bangkok nights; Robert DeNiro passing out in a puddle of opium den-induced dream-piss; drunken ghosts playing open-mic night in purgatory; an improv saxophonist’s heroin-nap; and, of course, the hazy curiosity that comes with waking up on a beach, alone, with lipstick smeared on your face, a toothpick perched upon your ear and some dude’s business card stuffed into your breast pocket. MALIBU NIGHTS, MALIBU DREAMS, MA- … oh man, I suck.
Long story short, “Sugar Pills” hits the surreal spot, so understated and lonely at times I’d never trust myself to listen to it in a depressed state, yet surprisingly buoyant when it hits the sniffing salts and jump-kicks out of its coccoon of coma. At certain intervals you’ll ask yourself if Raw Thug has ventured into random-, not-played-so-well-solo-on-various-instruments territory, and you’re right to question where it’s all going. In this case, I encourage you to take the full ride before passing judgement, as this dude is a straight-up Sound Peacock, proudly flaunting all the colors of the no-everything rainbow and whipping up a frothy groove while he’s doing it, his output redolent of all sorts of cats, from a slo-mo Matta Gawa to Talibam! to labelmates Metal Rouge to C. Spencer Yeh‘s recent solo stuff (which I’m actually not a huge fan of, sigh).
I don’t condone all the choices he makes, but goddamn it I respect them. Raw Thug may be a lot of things — crazy, spastic, ADD-addled, at once too patient and too impatient, furiously talented, oddly boundary-less — but he’s nothing if not a dutiful musician. He carries his ideas out to the umpteenth, caring not for rules or riddles; in this lies his true power.
