Colour Bük – “The Magic Keys to Conversation” MP3/download
Here’s a new pleasure of living in the tape age: It’s not at all impossible to find one’s self with several formats by a single artist. If it’s an artist you’re currently creaming corn over, well, all the better. Enter Colour Bük (formerly known as Le Rug).
I have in my possession a Colour Bük 7-inch, a Colour Bük LP and a Colour Bük cassette tape. Even better? I wouldn’t even know where to find a CD by this band. That’s comforting; it is. (I’m lying — Wir Wollen Wulle put out a CD-R called Live in the Well.)
If Colour Bük weren’t worth the paper they were printed on possessing a large cache of their material would be SHIT. Total shit. Thankfully, they’re sharp like a slippery switchblade and adept in the ways of the dark and dingy. On “Our Favorite Fucking Day of the Goddamn Year” their music sounds like a zombie shuffling down the street; at others it’s like Wet Hair is suicidal and monotone, squeezing one of those stress balls between its bony fingers.
Still more moods come and go, all of them inhabiting a separate sphere of spiritual dischord, yet there’s an overlying theme corroding it all to the core. I can’t quite put my finger on it — and if I do it’s too hot to leave for too long — what it is that they’re doing to my ears. Part No-Neck Blues Band, part stripped-down Avarus prototype, part Polyphus Ancephalos, part Pumice part a more-psych-prone Psychic Paramount, part Gang Wizard, part Sylvester Anfang II and part bloody-apocalypse, you can’t turn your back on this band — or this cassette — for a second.
You’ll find them tweaking around with a sample of a yak coughing up something and/or a high-pitched, Prurient-style squelch and then, when you stand back, you realize there’s much more afoot: A marching, insistent, buried-to-the-gills beat, table saws spitting dust about the room, long, forlorn grunts of every size and shape, a noise junkie injecting oscillations into his ear, a dick trying to fix your air conditioner with a rusty screwdriver; you’ve heard everything here before, but it’s never been arranged quite so dysfunctionally (my spellcheck is telling me “dysfunctionally” isn’t a word; if it truly isn’t, it should be).
It’s a perfect balance between atmospheric exploration — cut the shit; we’re talking noise here, right? — and precision pounding. Some of these death-drum rhythms are insistent enough to start a war, stern enough to scold a bitter, jaded child and refreshing enough to lend a pleasant odor to the refuse on display thoughout “Our Favorite Fucking Day of the Goddamn Year.”
I’m just getting started; don’t forget to check in, sonny.
