For The Record - April 12, 2007

http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/cms/content/view/515/31/

VIC THRILL + THE SATURN MISSILE

Circus of Enlightenment  [Circus Clone]

Few people are likely to forget their first encounter with Vic Thrill. Given the virtual absence of press about Vic—save for an incredible This American Life segment on his partnership with Hasid-turned-glam-rocker Curly Oxide—that first encounter is probably going to be at one of his storied live shows. For the uninitiated, here's a hypothetical scenario.

You're in a cramped, dimly lit club on the Lower East Side. For the past half-hour, a good-looking man wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt tucked into gold-sequined pants has been flitting about, chatting up people at the bar, earnestly cheering on the opening bands, assembling a heap of electronics to the side of the stage. It's getting late—the pleasant buzz of the past half hour has become a nagging fatigue and that terrible band the Decemberists is playing on the jukebox. God hates you. Why did your friends drag you here?

All of a sudden, the guy in the loud pants bounds onto the stage, accompanied by a shadowy figure armed with a Les Paul gold top and an impressive rig of effects pedals. "Hi, I'm Vic Thrill," the former says in a good-natured gravel tone, and, gesturing to his partner, "this is the Saturn Missile."

A drum machine kicks in with a manic beat that sounds utterly chintzy, like some kind of in-joke. Vic starts to shimmy around his mic stand, bobbing his head, smiling. The crowd responds in kind. This Saturn Missile character lays way the hell into his guitar, but at some point in the stompbox daisy chain his shredding mutates into the most infectious and bizarrely pretty sound you've ever heard.

Before long you're jumping up and down like a total idiot and you've decided that you really really love your friends and this is the best night you've had in a long while.

But the genius of Vic Thrill and the Saturn Missile is not bound by the four walls of a club; you may take it home with you. They sound best on a good pair of headphones, where the details of their arrangements—and these details are legion—really pop. Like its predecessor (CE-5, released in 2003), Circus of Enlightenment is a sonic horn o' plenty: Vic and Missile load the mix with beats and riffs and harmonizing robot choirs and other electronic doo-dads in ways that only the most inspired paranoid could truly comprehend.

The aesthetic is vaguely old-timey—a slice of country twang or an oblique reference to the Jewish folk music that wafts through Vic's Williamsburg neighborhood—and vaguely space-agey.

Cornpone and surf music run through a production gauntlet, emerging completely transfigured and somehow implicated in a story that may or may not involve pine trees, buzzards and a crystal ball. Dissonant guitars ping off nightmarish rimshots and stop on a dime, interrupted by a feeble rejoinder of pipes, only to rebound and scurry off into the eighth dimension. Hoarse shrieking dissolves into pristine falsetto as Vic's raving minstrel wanders through a tangle of monstrous carnival synths. But the effect is less pastiche than a chance encounter between novelty and nostalgia.

For me, the Vic Thrill/Saturn Missile sound evokes a childhood dream of bats—millions of them, flapping their wings up and down, zigzagging two by two across a Technicolor poppy field and smiling along to the beat.

No amount of namedropping will account for the Vic Thrill sound, and this fact may go some way toward explaining the rock-journalistic ambivalence concerning his output. "Like Prince and a barbershop quartet giving high fives to the entire Luaka Bop roster—in space! Perhaps: Robo-Beyoncé as interpreted by Current 93 playing the Grand Ole Opry? Or: Aphex Twin fucking Brainiac in the nostrils while Timbaland and Devo tweak each others nipples! (Suffice it to say, none of these really does it for me.)

The only helpful analogue I can think of is former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard. But whatever God-given talent Bob evinced with his high-kicks, impossible productivity and naïvist approach to rock music and it was a prodigious talent Vic one-ups him with sheer bizarrerie. Robert Christgau has not given us the critical apparatus needed to gloss the surrealist litany that is Church of Kong.

Vic Thrill is the barker at the Circus of Enlightenment, where "hate is met by the clowns of forgiveness who honk their horns like seals in the presence of killer whales." (Like Sea World, but more vaudevillian). In this act, Vic plays the zany, charismatic foil to the Saturn Missile's musicianly straight man.

The dynamic between the two—though perhaps more elusive on disc than in a live setting—makes for truly diverting entertainment, which is not something that can be said for most albums these days. But Circus of Enlightenment is clearly not most albums. It's funny and exciting and baffling and obnoxious and even a bit scary at times (do not listen to High on Wade while high it's a trap!), but the sentiment throughout is unfailingly chipper. Sincere, life-affirming stuff, without the embarrassment of sanctimony.

Circus of Enlightenment is available for download on iTunes.

–Kevin Sparks B'07