"Pop is noise - at least it often is. Blaring out from shop doorways and passing cars, infecting your head with its annoyingly catchy melodies, pop is an imposition, an invasion of space, unwanted sound forced upon you. But rarely - never - is pop Noise. That's to say, never does the drive for textural innovation come before pop's need to box-tick - to provide a verse, a chorus and hooks, hooks, hooks. Even at pop's outer limits, in the courts of Sonic Youth or Stereolab for example, textural experiments embellish the songs, not vice versa.
'Horribles Parade', a follow up to War's 2008 album 'New Raytheonport', is the exception. It's about as close as pop could possibly get to Noise without losing it's pop-ness altogether. Imagine taking a slice of early 1980s psychedelic pop, say, Arthur Brown's criminally underrated 1982 album 'Requiem', slapping it on the turntable and lowering the needle. Now apply a blowtorch to it, one of those little ones they use to crisp up creme brulees. When the grooves are getting gooey, just beginning to melt together and stick to the needle, but while there's still traces of music there, just before the sound dissolves into a cacophonic blur - that's Gary War's album.
On 'Horribles Parade' everything is subordinate to an extraordinary molten rush of processed analogue synth, a soup of vicious, slubbering chrome that whistles about the ears. War's vocals are similarly textured. Warped by a battery of effects, his voice is a sloshy alien gurgle, a subset of the synth's sonic remit - synth and vocals so similarly nuanced that it's often difficult to distinguish them. All other instruments, bass, guitar, lead synth, defer to this rush of sound. There are beats in there somewhere, but they're totally dominated, little matchsticks trapped in the goo.
That's not to say War - who's currently based in New York, and plays all the instruments on the album - doesn't have hooks and choruses. He has a super-abundance of them. He's not like one of these lo-fi fraudsters who use texture as a concealant, masking the weakness of their tunes with a bit of kudos-grabbing grit and distortion (you know who you are). He's a craftsman, his writing sprinkled with fistfuls of cleverness - the playful time-signature switch-ups on "Orange Trails" or "Carleen's Yard", for instance, or the awkwardly ambiguous tonality of opening track "Highspeed Drift". 'Horribles Parade' covers a hell of a lot of ground stylistically. There's "Everynight", with it's Arabic pop scales; the ska of "Sold Out"; or "Nothing Moving", with its spun-back percussion, light trails of echo vox and the chattering of grasshoppers. But where other songwriters would want to underscore their abilities in these departments, War has a vision of melting records to which every knee must bow. You actually have to listen to decipher what War is doing beneath the morphing texture-play. He cuts no slack for the regressive listener - if you don't listen you just get lost.
One of the pleasures of 'Horribles Parade' lies in trying to get your head around the songs' labyrinthine structures. With most conventional pop recordings, the sections are clearly demarcated and signified. There's a drum roll leading into the chorus, or a tumble of strings - you always know when it's coming, and when you're there. Not so with War. There's no throat-clearing here. Sometimes you'll be halfway through the chorus before you realise it's begun. You suddenly pick up on a repeated phrase, or a hooky keyboard riff will bob into hearing distance and it'll suddenly dawn on you that this must be it. Sometimes there are several choruses per song - on "Highspeed Drift", at least two, on "Costumes" there are one, two, three, or four, depending how you look at it. War tears down the fences between verse, chorus, bridge and solo and lets the categories flood into each other. The more you listen, the weirder things get. There are songs that aren't single songs but more like several melted together, and songs that never quite become whole, frozen in a perpetual becoming.
Too often, experimental pop isn't experimental at all.There are token nods in the direction of Neu!, or My Bloody Valentine, or whoever the hipster fetish du jour happens to be. There's nothing in the travesty of The Horrors' recent 'Krautrock' album, or TV On The Radio's post-punk deformations, that could really jeopardise mainstream appeal - it's experimental music for pop fans. 'Horribles Parade' on the other hand, is absolutely uncompromising in its vision. You couldn't play these songs on MTV. On your standard portable radio, the pop elements would be submerged by scree and gurgle. It's a challenging album, which demands you listen for it to reveal its subtleties. Pop for experimental music fans. 'Horribles Parade' is the bold statement of an incredibly eccentric vision, a complete rethink of the premises of pop writing." - Nick Richardson
http://www.thewire.co.uk