FUGU
& THE COSMIC MUMU - off
(LP+CD,
Rock is hell)
Side by side with the vinyl-release of Bulbul’s latest album
“6” (CD on Exile on Mainstream) in nine or ten different
versions Rock is Hell releases another album where Bulbul main core
Manfred Englmayr aka Raumschiff Engelmayr take part in: a full album worth
of songs by Fugu & The
Cosmic Mumu probably entitled “off”. Probably because I
ain’t so sure. “off” is the only word repeated once on the front cover
and once on the back, so that is a hint. Sides and probabilities are an
important factor in the work of Fugu & The Cosmic Mumu, but I’ll get
to that later on. Other people in the band are Bernhard Breuer on drums (who
is also known from Tumido),
Heimo Wallner (who plays with Bulbul regularly) on trumpet and vocals and
Martin Zrost on Bass and vocals. If you haven’t yet heard Fugu and think
that you know what you are in for by the list of people involved, think
again. This is where sides and probabilities come in.
The way Fugu steal and plunder through music history
sideways is wonderful. I liked “Lamento” when I first heard it on that unnamed pink CD-EP
due to its incredible mix of balkanesque, melancholic chord progressions and
sad melody with heavy ass dude guitar. And that means with high probability
you’ll never know where you might end up with this band, but it is
probably a great place, who knows. Speaking of which CD-EP, all four songs
of this one are also on the first side of this album, though in different
order. In the same vein, the first songs of each side come from the first
7”. Which leaves five new songs, or probably songs released somewhere else
that I don’t know of. The good news is though, that if you missed out on
the first releases, you might collect them all here in one simple purchase.
Yeah, Rockishell are perfect business people… or not.
Back to the music. The main wonder is the high affinity
to legendary melodic assignment in Fugu & the cosmic mumu. Some of the
melodies you will constantly feel you have heard before but can’t quite
put your finger on it. And they come from all ranges of music. I already
mentioned eastern european folklore (Lamento), but there is also soul on
“where the satellites shine” – a song actually written by Bulbul, but
probably too straight forward and cheesy in a good way for them – done in
a less impressive way as for instance Otis Redding would have done it, but
still a wonderful song. There are more complex structures (“oslo”) and
some easier to decipher (“milano”), yet they might change grades at any
given moment. It is a wild ride from one song to the next, a bucking
stallion at one point and like sliding downhill over a gravel route in an
old station wagon the next. Until it ends with the meanest motherfucker of
an anti-love song I think I ever heard.
And no matter what part it is, whenever you think you
know where something – a melody line, a riff, a trumpet line – comes
from, they’ll already have added something that makes it on the one hand
different meaning new and unique, and on the other hand different meaning a
little weird. “Zombie” is a perfect example for a song starting at one
place and ending somewhere else, with the low and slow vocals first and then
the strange noise bridge in the middle and then nothing but drums,
single-string electric guitar playing two notes and the narrater softly
falling away on himself at the end. Or the little electronic trickery and
gimmicks involved in “step by step”. And so on to a hundred destinations
more including harmony singing, reeds, flutes and dozen other things.
The whole album is rather mid-paced, falling in and out
of this structure over and over again. It is also not a heavy album and
actually you couldn’t even say it is a extremely weird or funny album. It
is the opposite of that and then also the opposite of that. As I said some
time above here, sides and probabilities are important, or actually rather
the unwillingness to settle on one fixed point or one fixed side of the
fence and therefore the high chance of things changing quite quickly, or, if
it is fine, then not. The only thing I can say for sure is, that “off”
by Fugu & The Cosmic Mumu will make my Top10 of 2007 for sure.
