You Fantastic
(Copyright © 1999-2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )

Homesickness, 6/10
On Fillmore: On Fillmore (2002), 5.5/10
On Fillmore: Sleeps With Fishes (2004), 5/10
Grand Ulena: Gateway To Dignity , 5/10
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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

When Dazzling Killmen disbanded, bassist Darin Gray joined Jim O'Rourke to cut When In Vanitas (Skin Graft, 1994) under the Brise Glace name, an album which also featured Illusion of Safety's Thymme Jones on drums. The following year Gray and Jones played also on Yona Kit (Skin Graft, 1995), another O'Rourke's project. Then Gray and Jones, with another Dazzling Killmen's outcast, guitarist Tim Garrigan, formed You Fantastic.

The band debuted with the EPs Riddler (Skin Graft, 1996), which contains ten untitled fragments, and Pals (Skin Graft, 1997), which contains one long minimalist trance. The inspiration for these records came from Slint, but with an emphasis on rhythm and loud "noise" which harks back to early Sonic Youth.

The structure of You Fantastic's debut album, Homesickness (Skin Graft, 1999), recorded between 1994 and 1998, recalls the band's first EP: 22 brief instrumental compositions, and a cornucopia of styles ranging from hardcore to free jazz. A few tracks are simply excerpts from live performances (often no more than a one-minute snippet). While the album is reminiscent of the post-modernist collage technique of This Heat, the overall feeling is closer to the disjointed works of Rake and God Is My Co-pilot.
Highlights include Friendless's quarreling of the trumpets on the calm motiv of the guitar, Memphis's tour de force of stone-age noise rock music (with Fred Frith-style's experiments in guitar noises and a long coda of industrial banging and psycho drones) and the two versions of Slowly's industrial mantra of horns and electronics over a syncopated dub rhythm.
The limit of the album is that most of these fragments are just that: rough, unfinished ideas. The absolute chaos of Cicero's, the childish banging of Retraction and so forth, aer personal notes of the musicians, not music for the rest of us.

After disbanding You Fantastic, Gray formed On Fillmore (Locust, 2002) with percussionist Glenn Kotche. Their experiment was streamlined on Sleeps With Fishes (Quakebasket, 2004): Kotche's switch to the vibraphone lent the sound a typical jazz-rock tone that defuses whatever r/evolutionary idea was originally behind the composition.

Then came Grand Ulena, whose Gateway To Dignity (Family Vineyard, 2003) sounds like adult, rocking, straightforward Dazzling Killmen. The mini-album Neosho (Family Vineyard, 2003) collects leftovers from the same sessions as the album.

(Copyright © 2003 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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