Dosh: Pure Trash
DOSH
PURE TRASH
ANTICON ABR0043
Certainly an unusual record to have issued from the Anti-Con axis Martin Dosh's second LP, themed around the birth of Dosh's child "Naoise", disappoints. The childish outsider art imagery of it's cover leads one to suppose one is entering a twisted imagination, a cave daubed with brutal impasto markings. This is, rather, a suburban cellar, where nothing intimate is revealed (the tension of many a solo project) and not much is at stake.
"Simple Exercises" sets the tone, somewhat clumsy breaks point groovy music which fails to groove. The looped vocal refrain: "Being pregnant and having a baby is not weird", while obviously an ear-marker of a tender domesticity, is even a little too coy for this young father. It's surely a brave move to attempt to present a radicalised home-life to the rest of the world, rather than to shunt it out of the domain of the broader culture; but perhaps the potency of family life lies in it's sacred privacy? Is this Dosh washing his nappies in public?
Other lowlights are "G Eye", more vaguely ham-fisted low-fi noodling, "Bye Rhodsy" causing one to ponder that the key to a good sounding drum lies less in the technique of battery than in the alchemy of microphone placement and impression of impact, and finally the ghastly faux-junglisms of "This is when things were looking up." This is very much a drummer's record, Dosh teaching the instrument to local children, and it's a shame that the extremely cheap-sounding production doesn't do justice to his skills.
"Pure Trash" certainly isn't all bad. "Dark Lord of Rhodes", eldritch and draped with drones is enthralling and "Rock it to the Next Episode", carried by a finger-popping plink-plonk underscored by drums skittering in the distance frames the record's slightly solipsistic (autistic?) tones as a jazzy outgrowth of the UK's fey electronica of the mid nineties. Likewise the murmured vocals of "Bring the Happiness" come as a relief, as if someone in a bright shirt enters Dosh's dank basement.