Hototogisu - Some Blood Will Stick (Important Records CD)

Brothers, I've had this Feist song stuck in my head all fucking day. The "mushaboom, sh'boom" one. What is a mushaboom anyway? I tried to Wikipedia it but my internets are painfully, heart-wrenchingly slow. I also thought about just posting the "Mushaboom" lyrics as a review and calling it a night, but that wouldn't be totally fair. Then my peepers fell upon something that would do in a pinch to blast any tune out of my ear: the manilla package I received today from the always-reliable (if somewhat unadventurous) folks at Important Records, who have been the victims of several of my reviews already this year. What can I say, they're like the reliable steed who will always net you a prosperous return whenever you lay down a wager. And they're pretty good at doing Hototogisu reissues too. "Some Blood Will Stick" is a reissue/rerelease/reinterpretation/reorganization of older, out-of-print releases "Swoon Scream" from 2004 and "Awful Symmetry" from 2005, the latter of which I actually own but am not about to go digging out at the moment. I thought the latter was Bower solo-era Hg but maybe I'm wrong. There's also a new and/or unreleased track here but no indication as to which one it is...mystery!
Six untitled tracks here, totalling a head-spinning 72 minutes. Tough to endure so much Hototogisu in one sitting but at least it isn't all full-on blastorama like "Chimarendammerung" (not that that's a bad thing, but it just might wear extremely thin over the course of such a lengthy period of time). First one sounds nothing like Hg as they exist today...okay maybe that's a stretch but it's got a considerable amount of paced percussion thumps, weird synth/keyboard canoodling and isn't completely buried under a wall of guitar noise! Well I say completely because the guitars eventually do show up and are joined by muffled, effected vocals (more like alien spoken word) from Bower. If Hototogisu ever had a slow jam, it would be this track...with all the space it has to unfold and stretch, I'm almost entirely disoriented. Moreso than usual even! Two sounds a bit more like the metal flirtations of "Green" minus the drum sampling...the red-hot guitar fizzling throughout the track reminds of a modern day classic from Campbell Kneale's Battlecruiser CD-R label, You Should Have Slain Me. If you took the YSHSM riff, cut it up ten different ways from Sunday and freebased a whole ton of other noises and howls on top of it, you'd arrive somewhere close to the proper station. Track three is one of two 20-minute epics, the other being the album's closer (and what I'd guess to be the "bonus" track). Bower and Bassett's guitars weave in and out with one providing a scorched brand of fire-eyed aggression and blustery wonder while and the other channelling a majestic, cascading white noise downpour as a backdrop. It never really goes anywhere but it doesn't need to either - the third minute is as good as the eighteenth minute which is as good as the four hundred and seventy seventh minute would be. The fourth and fifth untitled tracks are seven-minute space harriers, the former being what sounds to me like a very Skullflowery blasterpiece of feedback and tumbling shredded guitar riffs while the latter works your head over like a wind tunnel, scraping the cerebral edges with flickered touches of clarion axe sobs. Final track surprises even more than the first one did and answers my pleas for a return (?) to more melodic Hototogisu fair. The first few minutes could totally pass for a Tim Hecker record or something of that nature and the rest of the jam sees the duo sending out shards of angel-destroying six-stringed fissures...all the while giving plenty of space to the ghostly ambient forestrial 'scape propping up the jam. Nice! Yes. Nice. That's exactly the word.
Lots more goodies came my way from Important including the new Yellow Swans/Birchville Cat Motel collaboration as well as the Conrad Schnitzler 3xCD, so I'll be getting around to those in the near future...but I think a large portion of next week will be dedicated to the massive, almost incomprehensible package George Proctor aka Mutant Ape sent my way. Get ready for noise, noise, more noise, and lots of groups with names containing the words "fecal" and/or "turd". Mushaboom, sh'boom.