Sunburned Hand Of The Man: Fire Escape

sunburned-fire escapeHearing that Sunburned Hand of the Man were “leaders of the new weird America” caused Kieran Hebden of Four Tet to search the band out. He listened, liked the music immensely and was very interested in collaborating with them. Like Hebdens previous works with Animal Collective or former Sun Ra drummer Steve Reid, he seemingly influenced their sounds into something a bit more danceable, a bit more 70’s Kraut, a bit more Four Tet style jam. While the title track “Fire Escape” starts like an old man’s chime collection on a breezy day with random tambourine played by his naked sunbathing wife, it quickly evolves into a fast, hypnotic psych out. “The Parakeet Beat” is the jam on this record. It runs with a badass African drum line and has been remixed by Norway’s dance maestro Bjorn Torske. All in all the album wavers in and out of just about everything imaginable in Attention Deficit Disordered clips, with pretty piano ballads, smooth jazz trumpets, flanged out bass lines, a flute army, tight and plodding rhythms, sometimes concentrated, sometimes sparse, but somehow with a kind of desert feel, marching in from Can, Ash Ra Temple or Harmonia territory into hallucinating post-punk clatters of early PIL or Cabs. FIRE ESCAPE falls somewhere between the soundtrack to Burning Man Festival taking place in the Nevada desert and a plodding kraut rock opera with whirl horns, cut paste feelings and intuitively placed spontania and would probably go well served with madness plus drug cocktails :: Sunburned Hand Of The Man/Fire Escape - (Smalltown Supersound/Rough Trade).