It Thing, featuring Melanie Clarin De Giovanni, Josh Housh and Mark Zanandrea, present "Kensington Way Revisited" on 180gm vinyl. Now available at ETown Records
Biography
It Thing sprang from the minds of former Cat Heads, Mark Zanandrea
and Melanie Clarin. Their album "The Ode to Billy Joe Bob
Dylan Thomas Jefferson Airplane Experience" (Baited Breath,
1992) was independently released and featured superbly arranged
pop songs. Almost all the material was recorded in makeshift, low-tech
conditions.
The title track
is, as the title suggests, a soldierly ode that opens with a military
drumbeat, but the tender, naive hippie refrain is married with madrigal-esque
vocal harmonies and a sinister, slovenly college-rock progression.
This play of contrasts behind the seeming simplicity is probably
the key to reading the entire album.
In Send,
we seem to hear all at once an old-timey jug band, the mannerist
pop of Game Theory and the humble rock and roll of the Galaxie 500.
Rite Me Rong
manages to capture in one snapshot the bass drum of country and
western, the hiccups of rockabilly and the crackling guitars of
the 1920s.
Even
if the high points of this record are the magical folk-rock tunes,
the trio knows how to growl too, whether in the ultra-electrified
Cupid Is a Sniper, the urgent Lonely Seconds,
which recalls the Stones at their most tribal, or the agitated garage
rock of Stop Thinking Curt.
In line with
the psychedelic singers of the 1960s, the two songwriters indulge
in apolitical tones: from the solemn and nervous Neil Young-esque
elegy of Hole in the Back of My Head to the quasi-religious
Hand Grenade, to the lyrical testament of the album,
Here Come the Flies, a disturbing metaphor of wartime surrender
with a passage from the ethereal to the infernal that suggests Tim
Buckley or Bob Dylan run through the mill of grunge rock.