coming on to it I wasn’t sure what I was looking at
The musicians involved in 2 Foot Flame come from art backgrounds and this is very much an art project. Hell, there’s nothing more art than savaging the credentials of artists you disrespect, and with the first track, they tear New Zealand/Czech portraitist Gottfried Lindauer to shreds. I think. As is her tradition as established with her primary group, Mecca Normal, Jean Smith uses 2 Foot Flame as something of a platform for her dystopian, angry monologues of distaste and disgust for all manner of things, not all of them necessarily clear. Peter Jefferies and Michael Morley bring with them their esteemed pedigree in the anarchic New Zealand noise scene (Morley being notably the primary culprit behind The Dead C’s ear-destroying acts of guitar feedback violence), and 2 Foot Flame is an arty collision of noise terror and furious, apocalyptic poetry.
The strangely beautiful cover art (by Jean Smith) is a good indicator of what is to be found within – a blurred to incoherence photograph of an airplane, torn and creased, possibly with flames ignited, with the legend ‘An exciting novel of the intriguing world of international embassies,’ all of it suggesting terrorism, technology, mobility, and maybe spontaneous human combustion. What is it Bradbury said in Fahrenheit 451 about burning? It is an album beautiful in its ugliness. “Lindauer” is brutally droning, Morley creating a perpetual detuned cacophony while Smith spits about myopia and coddling. “To the Sea” is even more sonically assaulting, so when Peter Jefferies steps behind the piano for a threatening march on “Already Waiting” it comes as a welcome respite, as Morley wrings tortured, percussive sound out of his guitar in the background somewhere, and Smith howls ‘these dangerous habits seemed practical at the time.’ It is abrupt music all over, the songs end as if someone has flicked a cut-off valve, and the vocals and instrumentation will come stabbing in without warning throughout them, leaving just as suddenly. Not an easy listening experience. This creates a weird sense of dread in “Mr. H” where Morley’s guitar is a lurking subterranean presence that can erupt into agonized howls at any given moment, like the ‘concrete cutter’ that Smith is raving about. Sure, “Reinvention” is just pure atmospheric piano with Smith’s vocals about as restrained as they get, but after all that, the mind is tensed for sudden attacks.
However, it is not until the creepy final four songs that the band really comes together as one fierce unit. “Compass” is practically majestic, with the guitar tuned so far back into the ether that it only exists as a speaker-rattling ambient hum terrorizing the stereo channels in waves. “The Arbitrator” boosts the energy level to a punk-rock level, each member of the band trying to slice through their own separate cocoon of muffled static until it all spirals out of control at the end. “Cordoned Off” is the big moment the whole damn album seems to build toward, with guitar and keyboard in a constant oscillating white noise hum and Smith on some paranoid fever dream monologue of swans picking at their feathers and snow and fire, then as the static reaches a zenith, she breaks off with ‘can we do this another time? I don’t really remember…’ The understated “Chisel” is a bit anticlimactic in comparison to that ten-minute onslaught, but makes up for it with imagery of ritualistic creation of tools from human bone.
2 Foot Flame are not an easy band to listen to, and this debut is rather more off-centered than their second album, but it has a great demented allure for its heavy art noise collision of the worlds of The Dead C and Mecca Normal.
****
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