The night Maurice Fulton met his second wife, life with Denise finally stopped
haunting him, stopped lingering, those mournful piano chords ringing
in his ears since a broken heart drove him all the way to Brighton (the
starchy suburb by Melbourne's bayside, not the English coastal town where
Matt Elliott's never been), finally fading to fade-out, all that melancholy
that'd consumed him engulfed by a whole new set of sentiments stirred
up upon meeting his Very Own Yoko Ono. Since then, Mo's ditched such
sadness for Mu's much madness, bedding down in a bizarre jamboree with
Mutsumi Kanamori, their musical nuptials a mad-hatte(re)d tea party not
recommended for the gin-sipping bitches of members-only establishments.
Fulton's fulsome array of monikers — Syclops, Stress, Basement Boys,
Eddie and the Eggs — once cast him as a don dishing up the percussive
house with but an undercurrent of beat-breaking strangeness. But here
he throws himself full-tilt into such (strangeness), following the irrepressible,
uninhibited idiocy of his partner in crime, throwing his house bounce
in a blender — along with "punk funk" party-starters (Mo-Mo having
banged-the-gong/tonked-the-cowbell for the exclaiming eagerness of the
egotistical/already-passe !!! dudes), disco-not-disco handclappers, proto-electro
minimalismo, blood-lipped free-jazz fist-ups, and Blechdomist scatology — and
leaving the lid off. Sending the obliterated fragments of its ingredients
out like so many musical splatters, Mu puts the spastic in spastickated,
lurching through rhythms that buzz with intermittently animated life
like lifeless limbs twitching from a mild electric current, the electricity
here being the domesticated chemistry between the boy-who-met-girl and
the girl-who-emancipated-him. But, to paint Mutsumi as mere muse is amiss,
the titular Mu of this duo being her, really; Fulton is just going along
for the ride on her wild ride, the girlie-show girl doing a Peaches-gone-performance-art
punk-rock shtick, all electroshock shock-tactics, that seems at once
archetypal and idiosyncratic, using her insistent, individual personality
to just play into and up to too many predictable clichés. She
may show me love for Luke Jenner and, uh, Michael Jackson, but for the
most Mutsumi is as angry as a hip-hopper with beef: offering a depressing
amount of cringeworthy swearing; kicking off the disc with a cut called "Haters" (my
single least-favorite term/concept in the history of humanity; I can
just imagine Hitler calling all those protesting Heebs a bunch of Haters,
then telling all the Playas at his Third Reich rally to "put their hands
in the air"); and endlessly slagging off Tigersushi boss Charles Hagelsteen
(see: "Tigerbastard," "So Week People," "I'm Coming to Get You," "Like
a Little Bitch)," who, we're to guess, screwed Mu over when releasing
their first record. Much of this dreary lyricism will be seen as English-as-a-second-language
charm by so many — and the album's lyric sheets, which put forth
all the spelling-mistake-riddled broken English with pride, seem to be
of the same belief. But loving that about this disc is like so much faint
praise at best, and a pernicious kind of cultural condescension at worst.
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