TOPSYTURVY - "YVRUTYSPOT" (INDEPENDENT)
THE ORIGINAL VERSION, BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
Imagine a man. A man with the mental and musical abilities of a toddler, perhaps, but still, if you stretch the meaning of the word to the maximum any dictionary would allow...a man. Imagine that man in a bedroom. Imagine now, if you will, a tape recorder in that bedroom. In fact, imagine a basic drum kit and a Korean brand guitar (the kind that goes out of key the instant you strum a chord) as well. This man (...) has been the subject of a musically misplaced childhood. His parents have probably loved an, um, eclectic mix of music. Scottish Highlands bagpipers, John Denver, Michael Flatley, the Gypsy Kings, 50's Hawaiian style guitar music, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Pat Boone, Abba, and some imported Dutch shit by Mouth and MacNeal. Imagine him bobbing his head - totally out of beat obviously - to the latest Avant Garde Art-Pour-L'Art CDr made by his socially stunted neighbour named Elmer. It's the first thing Elmer has done since the accident that left him deaf, blind and paralyzed from his ears down.
"Hey," he thinks, "if my bestest buddy Elmer can do this, I could do something like this too!" (obviously, his thoughts would be way more incoherent and probably incomprehensible to anyone with both feet still planted firmly on the good side of the edge of insanity, but I don't want your imagination to get stretched too far).
Two days later, this one-man band has "Yvrutyspot" ready to send to unsuspecting label owners and music review magazines alike. "An album with different kinds of experimental songs," he enthuses (after his babblings have been translated by his nearest relative who hasn't yet shot himself in the head twice). Well, if anything, they do sound like an experiment to me - the kind of experiment that renders the 1940's nuclear project seem benign and pacifist by comparison. I realise I have used the phrase "pointless noise" in a few reviews before, but rarely before did the words seem so properly tailor-fit for the occasion. It's not even loud or heavy or hardcore or whatever, it's just noise. And, indeed, it is very, very pointless.
Sonny Harrisson is the one-man band in question. I think I would rather have liked the things he's been up to in his bedroom to remain unknown to the world at large. How can a single man (or boy, whatever) suck so profoundly at so many things? He cannot play the guitar, he cannot play the drums, he cannot compose, he cannot sing, he cannot produce or mix, in fact he can't even think up a halfway decent band name. To top it all off, he has a gratingly unpleasant voice that reminded me vaguely of an off-key version of some old 70's electro pop vocalist (oh geez I might have given a compliment here, though not intended). This waste of perfectly good plastic is so bad that I strongly doubt he will get it reviewed much. Indeed, my first reaction was also just to toss it in the bin. This, I knew, is the kind of CD I wouldn't even dare to use as a beer coaster, for fear of the beer somehow going off. Throughout my torturing my eardrums with this shite, my wife said "goh, wat is dit erg" now and again, with emphasis on different words to lend her statements extra revulsive strength. This is Dutch for "damn, this is really bad." Just like with me, the music made her feel suddenly flatulent, weirdly depressed and somehow angry. To think of the other, less useless things we could have done while I gave this miserable piece of crap a whir...like visiting a Kenny G. concert or counting the pebbles in Wales. "Yvrutyspot" is worse than the sonic equivalent of what the cat dragged in: It's the sonic equivalent of the cat's vomit after it's done with whatever it was it dragged in.
In a way it was nice to re-discover that there are CDs worse than "St. Anger". Way worse, in fact. Life is too short for this. I can't be buggered to make a 'zero bullets' graphic, so it'll get 1...
Quit this shit, Sonny.
RK
Written August 2003