HOWLING GRUEL - "Jolly Jape" LP

Howling Gruel - Jolly Jape LP (Wormwood Grasshopper, 2015) "RECOMMENDED: The products of the Wormwood Grasshopper label are centered around one key approach to musicmaking: that of instability, in all its quivering wobble. Howling Gruel continues a product lineage back to two earlier Tasmanian bands in the Grasshopper fam, Hammering The Cramps and Drunk Elk. The former shook a ‘90s zine-cultured psychedelic rock sound until it broke; the latter played a dramatic flail with its backs turned. Howling Gruel seems immediately more confident than those acts, now charging a poppier, hook-oriented sound from deliriously incorrect angles. Instrumentation is guitar, drums, and a synthesizer that at sounds like it’s been called back into service from a previous life as a apartment buzzer or maybe a Morse code transmitter, and might as well be played when the musician touches two exposed wires together. The intermittent buzz of this instrument, and the uncertain style in which the vocals are del