Graham Lambkin

Amusingly, The Shadow Ring’s third album was originally intended to be a collection of outtakes and live recordings for Bruce Russell’s new Corpus Hermeticum label, but a crucial recording from the band’s US tour was accidentally left in a bar. That setback was ambitiously overcome by recording an entire album of new material instead and it was notably the first to feature Tim Goss as a full-time member. Notably, Goss had been making sample-based music with a computer, so his inclusion coincided with the arrival of some better gear. Consequently, this album significantly departs from its more primitive predecessors with improved sound quality, a strong emphasis on electronics, and the involvement of the Goss family piano.

That said, Graham Lambkin’s discordantly out-of-tune guitar strums remain a central feature at this stage and Goss occasionally proves himself to be similarly adept at unleashing his own eruptions of annoying dissonance. At other times, however, the trio unexpectedly conjure something best described as outsider musique concrète along with surprisingly effective squalls of noise and feedback. Unsurprisingly, Darren Harris’s vocals remain delightfully unsettling, compelling, and enigmatic as ever, but this album is unexpectedly more significant for its flashes of brilliance with the music itself, which is not something I often say about The Shadow Ring.

The opening “You’re Holding All Your Feathered Stock” is one of the stronger pieces on the album as well as one of the more representative pieces (for better or worse), as Lambkin’s thorny guitar strumming gives the pieces the feel of some kind of ragged and ritualistic occult procession while Harris ominously announces that the screaming birds are being kept away from sunlight and harm. It’s great while it lasts, but it also boasts a lengthy self-sabotaging outro of shrill synth indulgence. The following “Catching Sight” has the opposite trajectory, as it begins with somewhat half-baked piano hammering yet gradually (if lazily) blossoms into a mystifying yet vivid sound collage that feels like a collision of farm machinery, sprinklers, animal sounds, spacy synth throb, and a mechanical monkey. It then closes with the explicit introduction of some of the album’s unlikely central themes (and recurring refrains) about the importance of taking some time to get it right and the question “who says vermin are shy?” Elsewhere, the trio’s “self-mythologizing lyrics” additionally “celebrate the clicking of horse hooves, ponder the sociability of rats and mice, and warn of the dangers of poultry.”

My favorite piece is “Recovered Meat,” as the trio gradually whip up a properly unhinged and visceral onslaught of howling electronic mayhem over an understated beat and a pleasantly bleeping and squirmy synth motif. Elsewhere, “Camel or Carthorse” is album’s most charming piece, as Lambkin somewhat tunefully (if morosely) sings a lilting melody about fur bonnets and other Shadow Ring concerns over comparatively amiable acoustic guitar. It has the feel of an outsider sea shanty (not unfamiliar terrain for the band), but then Harris suddenly crashes the party with a spoken (and vaguely threatening) meta-narrative about what the song has accomplished so far and warns “I’ve got some more of this music” and further declares that “a hit is a hit.” “Rats and Mice” is a perverse delight as well, as Harris again urges listeners to “get things right” through a veil of distortion over a distracted and shambolic martial rhythm strafed by electronic chaos and feedback.

That said, the quality of the individual songs on Wax-Works Echoes is really secondary to the experience of being immersed in The Shadow Ring’s insular, unsettling, and half-creepy/half-funny headspace, as there is nothing else quite like it. There is rarely a moment in which the nexus of provocative art, willful obnoxiousness, and elaborate joke is not incredibly blurry, but that gives the album a sense of macabre fun no matter how dour Harris seems about the various absurd plights facing him. While there are certainly cerebral shades of a conscious musique concrète influence and Jandek-ian guitar misuse as well as actual poetry, the band are equally likely to play mattress springs, abuse walkie-talkies and answering machines, rant about vermin, credit non-existent band members, or bring in a guest like Richard Youngs to make noises with a chair. Anything goes and it is all gleefully deranged. 

Given that. sometimes this album can admittedly be really damn annoying, but the moments when everything works feel like a haunting and inscrutable transmission from a grimy, hallucinatory, and mouse-plagued alternate dimension and there is nothing else quite like it on earth. The band were definitely in the thrall of some (curdled) white-hot inspiration here. Also, I genuinely admire the fact that three resourceful broken-brained weirdos living with their parents in a coastal resort town took the time to get things so gloriously wrong that they grabbed the attention of underground music luminaries all over the world (and managed to do it without Harris’s parents even noticing that he was in a band for several albums). This is one of my favorite Shadow Ring albums.

 Listen here.