CAT#: ULY030
ARTIST: David Michael Moore
TITLE: Buzzcats... Raw and Dirty
DATE: 07/02/2024
FORMAT: Digital
PRICE: $7

1996's ‘Buzzcats… Raw & Dirty’ is perhaps the shadow work counterpart to the previously released ‘Bird Head Burlando’ (1994) — its After Hours version, if you will. Like ‘Bird Head,’ ‘Buzzcats’ also leans quite heavily into purely percussive composition. But whereas ‘Birdhead’ is a gassed up solar blast, Buzzcats moves in darkness. And no — before you ask — we’re NOT just calling it the “after dark” version because it contains a song called “Two Views of Uranus.” No, in fact, the entire mood here is that of those wee hours. The Kingdom of Night breathing all around and into these songs. Buzzcats deals in mystery you see. The hootowls and crickets are in full chorus. Hash smoke and half drank jug of homemade wine. A synthesized buzzbox meditation on Little Drummer Boy delivers us into dream, a sweltering Christmas in July and chestnuts roasting on the open fire of our mud hut. And now we astral project from the banks of the muddy Mississippi to the ancient byzantine medina of Tangier. We’ve become Paul Bowles — or the essence thereof — elegantly slithering and languidly stumbling around each dimly lit corner, from shadow to shadow, following the distant sound of David’s “Dog Spokes.” And just as we near, we’re cast back to Mississippi where the wine slowly disappears beyond the blood-brain barrier. We perform the sacred “Snake Dance” for the sleeping hounds whose bones will one day be made into a xylophone. We sing an ode to the hootowls who keep logs of our secrets. They won’t tell.