Rob Sinclair and Bevan Revell: Pansousiance (Rattle/bandcamp)

 |   |  1 min read

We Were After Hair
Rob Sinclair and Bevan Revell: Pansousiance (Rattle/bandcamp)

With the self-titled album by Ferocious last year – vocals/organ Bill Direen, drums Johannes Contag and guitar Mark Williams – Auckland's Rattle label pushed its already broad parameters into experimental poetry, alt.rock and beats.

Perhaps encouraged by the critical reception the album was given, Rattle now presents this equally challenging and different album by multi-instrumentalists Rob Sinclair (Schtung, Big Sideways, 3 Voices) and Bevan Revell (session work after returning from Europe).

With standard equipment – guitars, drums, piano – augmented in places by Indian shenai, bass clarinet, pot lids and handmade instruments, Pansousiance (a neologism meaning wide-ranging indifference?) slips between the cracks of gloomy poetry (In Dutch Quarter with its leper, pus, a High Priestess in an underground voodoo den), left-field folk (Dirty Rat Lodger) and shapeshifting instrumentals. 

Covid is here on the slurry speak-sing From Whence She Came? (“Lax procedure in a P4 lab, Wuhan university”) and the slow and eerie Lockdown with multi-tracked vocals slightly out of synch (in the manner of Graeme Jefferies)  with guest singer Louise McDonald: “I've seen the news but it ain't getting through, people dying lonely”.

Throughout there is a sense of dislocation and isolation evoked by the disorientating vocals, odd and changing time signatures and the instrumentation.

The subtitle of the album doesn't lie: “A selection of snapshots of a world askew”.

Perhaps start with the instrumentals (Selling Mustard Seed, They're Everywhere, Nagoyagogo, Washable Pok Dum Blean which is sometimes Waits-meets-gamelan) before undertaking Panspeciel Transmission (about scientists messing with DNA), Grandees Ball (decadence and the dead being transported across the Styx) or the most straight-ahead songs here (that being a relative comparison) Poison Pigeons and On the Shelf.

You can discover their version of Isa Lei for yourself. 

Welcome to the difficult listening hour.

.

You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here

.

These Further Outwhere pages are dedicated to sounds beyond songs, ideas outside the obvious, possibiltiies far from pop. Start the challenge here.


Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Further Outwhere articles index

ROTOR+ CONSIDERED (2013): A beautiful journey into the black

ROTOR+ CONSIDERED (2013): A beautiful journey into the black

For many decades Avis, the international rental car outfit, had slogans which were variations on its position as number two in the market. Among them was “When you're only No 2, you try... > Read more

Alan Brown: Murmur (Rattle Seventh House Music/bandcamp)

Alan Brown: Murmur (Rattle Seventh House Music/bandcamp)

Keyboard player Alan Brown's recent ambient and improvised work has frequently found favour at Elsewhere because he often steps beyond the Eno-obvious and into rather more allusive soundscapes.... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

BURN YOUR BRIDGES. BURN YOUR BRIDGES, CONSIDERED (2003): The phlegm and the fury

BURN YOUR BRIDGES. BURN YOUR BRIDGES, CONSIDERED (2003): The phlegm and the fury

As regular readers will know this column happens when I pull an album off the shelf at random and sit down to give it some consideration. It's in the random nature that sometimes it might be an... > Read more

The Dire Straits Experience, Aotea Centre, Auckland Oct 2 2014

The Dire Straits Experience, Aotea Centre, Auckland Oct 2 2014

Some time at the tail end of last century I spent a very funny evening backstage with Tina Turner, Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart. There were lots of laughs . . . although it did seem there was... > Read more