Truce Opium by Dark Meat
LABEL: Emergency Umbrella Records

“I can tell they strapped down to write songs instead of letting them pour forth from the mystical backwoods of Georgia. Some people will call it maturity, but I doubt the band will.”

I think my biggest complaint with Dark Meat’s new album Truce Opium is that it’s too short. Even after the twelve minute monk/Indian-like chanting big finale called “Song of the New Year,” I want more. I’m three beers in. I’m getting a good buzz and then BAM! No more beer and every store is closed. It’s a horrible feeling. You end up drinking table wine or sniffing markers or worse, listening to the new Jay Reatard album. Truce Opium doesn't leave you with the same satisfied feeling as Dark Meat's amazing 2006 debut Universal Indians which clocks in at a whopping 70 minutes, 20 more than this new album. And yet, there will probably not be a better 50 minutes of recorded music released this year.

Dark Meat hails from Athens, Georgia. The band’s got more than twenty members but less than fifty, though the press release says this album only has nine. I’m not even sure they know exactly who's in the band, but it sounds like a lot more than nine. Based on the band’s two albums, you can tell they like a lot of psychedelic fuzz from the 60s, the Stooges, the Meat Puppets and free-jazz master Albert Ayler. Some people love to use hyphens to describe them. Here’s my best: Southern-punk-psych-jazz-n-p-funk ensemble. I’ve seen them live two times and I equate them to a hipster Parliament/Funkadelic except I don’t think any of them try hard enough to be qualified as a full blown Williamsburg trash HIPSTER. Hipsters, well New York hipsters anyway, don’t seem to even like them anyway. They are too loud. They have too much fun. They don’t look at their shoes when they play. They look you straight in the eye and say, “What the hell is the matter with you? Life is great! Dance, mother fucker!”

There's definitely dancing on Truce Opium, but its no longer outside dancing. You get the feeling this was made in a studio or possibly a barn, but definitely not in a meadow like Universal Indians. The bird whistling songs and random talking and laughing fits at the end of songs are absent. I can tell they strapped down to write songs instead of letting them pour forth from the mystical backwoods of Georgia. Some people will call it maturity, but I doubt the band will. There also doesn't seem to be any unified theme like the Albert Ayler on acid theme of the first album, but it could simply be a message of having fun and smoking opium. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that's not the case, but if it is I warn you this review may be tainted because I've stuck to drinking. My Chinatown opium pipe hasn't seen action in days. I mean weeks.

“Each song is basically a catchy guitar riff and chorus that slowly runs off course. When it runs off course is when you are going to have the most fun.”

In the press release, which I mentioned earlier, it does say the band jammed with a Carnatic classical troupe from South India. Instruments include a tanpura, bulbal tatang and sitar. They sing in prayer-like group chants and have studied "the reverent application of polyharmonic Sygyt and Kargira Tuvan throat-singing." I have no idea what a lot of that means, but I'm sure I hear all of it when the band really freaks out in the two longest songs on the album, "No One Was There" and "Song of the New Year." Each song is basically a catchy guitar riff and chorus that slowly runs off course. When it runs off course is when you are going to have the most fun. It's almost as if Jim McHugh, lead singer/guitarist, starts to play a fairly basic rock n' roll song and then the horn section from P-Funk, the entire remaining members of the Grateful Dead and Ravi Shankar show up to take the song into an entirely new universe. "Last of the Frontiersman" is a Kinks song on acid. "The Faint Smell of Moss" sounds like Jethro Tull flying Jefferson Airplane. You can hear the 60s and yet, it doesn't sound stale.

Sideranting aside, the music is good. Truce Opium is one of the best albums you can buy or illegally download in 2009. Everything that's cool in independent music nowadays is absent, which is the absolute greatest compliment I can give. There's nothing lo-fi about Dark Meat. They even make the hi-fi bands look puny. They've got a horn section called the Vomit Laser band and when they start squealing Steve Mackay-style on "Yonderin," you'll say, man this sounds like Funhouse. Then Jim McHugh will start growling his best Iggy growl and you'll forget all about Iggy's post 1973 sins and everything will be OK.


REVIEWED BY ADAM WISNIESKI
ADAM'S 3 FAVORITE TRACKS: "Future Galaxies" • "Last of the Fronteirsman" • "Yonderin"
Read more by Adam on his blog, Short Wave Rockin