There aren’t many things in life as beautiful as holding a fresh nicely handmade-packaged vinyl. You get intimate with what’s behind it, watching it taking its spins on the turntable and the sound reaching your ears. It’s easier to focus, not starring at a computer screen, no digital equalizers either. Just sound, two pages of artwork and a description that does a hell of a lot more talking than any page on the internet would do. And of course, the vinyl keeps spinning.
When I received ‘Soul Music’, crafted in hand screenprinted artwork, I played it immediately. Forget The Times is not your ordinary experimental group. Strongly guitar-driven, improvised by blasting drums and a significant amount of fuzz, it demands more than one listen to get to it. In times you find yourself getting into strange drone compositions, before your monitors start exploding fuzz and noise all over. From free jazz to stoner and all the way back, it’s pretty clear that it’s a record made only for the sake of musical expression; not going for that overworked ‘shiny’ production but not keeping it lo-fi either. There’s no point in me going through the record track by track, as what matters most here is the flow. How from the vocal parts on the fuzzy ‘Dead Slint’ you get into that crazed jam on ‘Wash Yr Grippers’ and then finally into the acoustic-based drone of ‘Pillows And Blankets’. And that’s only Side B. The 4 tracks on Side A set the ground for the whole record; starting off with repeated horn patterns, loud fast drumming and guitars that sound like ancient angry bells, those first two minutes go by the title ‘Romans In Storage’, turning into ‘Marion Morrison’ where you can actually visualize the whole recording process (sampled guitar and words probably played backwards). An aggressive 8-minute ‘From The Basement To The Grave’ exploration on guitar noise, a psyched-out impersonation of alarms and voices screaming on ‘Alarm Clock Celebration’ and you already have experienced a lot.
Forget The Times just got back from touring with Problems That Fix Themselves and Batcaves, doing almost 17 shows in about a month. Their upcoming release is going to be a tape coming out on Space Slave Editions later on this year.
