I bet this guy is the most fun to play a show with EVER. Essentially some weirdo playing a gazillion instruments he just made out of household tubing and a destroyed piano and groaning his way over the resulting wasted mess like Captain Beefheart being throttled with a vacuum cleaner by Little Howlin? Wolf. The thing crawls along with no small amount of spite and determination; the centre-point of the album being a nine-minute scrape and squeal torture-fest that bleeds out of the stereo slowly and painfully. But it?s not without a sense of wry humour, and the pizzicato strings that enter towards the end of the track don?t take themselves anywhere near as seriously as they might, giving the whole track a kind of attractive pathos ? like he?s been deliberately crawling over broken glass for the last 5 minutes only to realise it?s really plastic but anyway it?s past 3 in the morning and he?s powerfully drunk on cheap cider. But that?s not to suggest Wind Swept Planes doesn?t take himself seriously ? any endeavour that sounded this off-kilter, this belligerently dissonant, a-rhythmic and self-styled that was a plain JOKE simply wouldn?t be able to stand up more than 2 minutes, and this guy manages a whole half hour. ?Poppies Suffocating Roses? loses a great deal of the overdubbed insanity and suffers for it, as that nylon string acoustic can?t stand up on its own nearly as well as it can surrounded by all manner of kitchen klangs and screeching tyres. Maybe by this point he?s onto the whiskey. There?s some nicer guitar on the closer, albeit with a goblin trying to scratch it a new sound hole and much falsetto moaning. I?d still rather see him live because I bet he totally scares the shit of boring pretend ?folk? types who use huge hollow body electrics and think they?re Oberon or something. 7/10 -- Evan Rhodes (7 August, 2007)