Aural Innovations review Ron Tree/Judge Trev album

[trev]

As usual John, an accurate review, showing your usual great insight into
thing musical.

"Insect Brain" is, as you point out a very different baby from Inner City
Units edgy lunacy and Atomgods revolutionary head bashing.
It can, however take you to places which those other bands never knew
existed. I think it works on a subliminal level for which you must be in a
state of open acceptance to reach - a bit Nada Yoga-ish. A bit dangerous
even.
You will find that the snippet chanting will increase, louder, louder, over
and over and over again - until - ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha
hahaha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....
I think we might get a deal for it after were all dead. lol

Trev

AND THERE CAME THE BEASTS AND KINGS WITH THEIR ARMIES AND THEIR CAPTAINS TO
MAKE WAR WITH HIM UPON THE HORSE AND TO MAKE WAR WITH HIS ARMIES AND HIS
EYES WERE AS A FLAME OF FIRE HE WAS CROWNED WITH MANY CROWNS AND IN
RIGHTEOUSNESS HE JUDGES AND IN RIGHTEOUSNESS HE WAGES WAR
http://www.judgetrev.com

REAL FESTIVAL MUSIC - RFM   http://www.realfestivalmusic.co.uk
Festival Listings, Festival Reviews, CDs, Video Downloads, News, Forum,
Chat, Healers


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Jarrett" <jjarrett at CHIARK.GREENEND.ORG.UK>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET>
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: Aural Innovations review Ron Tree/Judge Trev album


> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, trev wrote:
>
>> Here it is:  http://www.aural-innovations.com/issues/issue30/moab01.html
>
>        Hi Trev,
>                 he seems surer of his reaction than I have been! I
> suddenly understand why you've been having record company indifference to
> this, none of them would know what on earth to do with it would they? ike
> Beefheart shouting about how difficult it is to do poetry these days to a
> crowd full of people shouting for `Booglarize you Baby'.
>
>        Um, anyway. I wrote some reactions. I shan't post 'em to the list
> in case you think they aren't the advert you might have wanted, which
> isn't to say I don't like the album, just that I'm confused by it in
> about equal measure. Use the text as you like, not that anyone much would
> see my name as an endorsement, but anyway, here is wot I wrote, or
> something, yours,
>                  Jon
>
> ObCD: The Bevis Frond - _Valedictory Songs_
>
> MOTHER OF ALL BANDS - _INSECT BRAIN_
>
>        I have to say that this album was something of a surprise to me.
> Knowing bassist Ron Tree's punk background and the way he worked with that
> in Hawkwind, and owning quite a lot of guitarist Judge Trev'swork with
> Inner City Unit and The Atomgods, I was expecting high-speed punk. Wasn't
> this, after all, a band which Terry Ollis had refused to join because they
> played too fast? Instead, they seem to have borrowed Senser's drummer and
> that too leads one to think high speed intricacy.
>
>        Well, this is not what it is, so you may as well shed that idea
> straight away. This is actually mostly an album of jamming and tone
> poems. The rhythm section is surprisingly anonymous; Ron's playing is very
> minimalist one-string stuff for the most part and the drummer is content
> to sit back and hold things down. Even Judge Trev, though he does let go
> into impressive soloes when given the chance, and is a fine player in
> almost any situation, almost seems to have stepped away from the
> metaphorical mike when he gets his chances. Perhaps this is my
> imagination, perhaps it's production but nonetheless, with a few notable
> exceptions, the instruments here are content to stick with a steady
> straight-ahead approach. This makes the best thing on the disc in some
> ways one of the two covers, a version of Hawkwind's `Spirit of the Age'
> which challenges any reading after the original but is of course a song
> Ron and Trev have been playing a long time now. It falls down rather when
> faced with material like the Atomgods' `Dolphins Über Alles' because here
> the drummer and bassist don't really know what's missing and how to supply
> it. The band, then, for some reason which given who's in it is difficult
> to fathom, is restricting itself to backing work.
>
>        That leads one on to the question of what's at the front, of
> course, and the answer, except for a couple of songs sung (really quite
> well) by Trev, is Ron Tree in possibly his finest ever voice, which may
> explain things. More controlled than when he was with Hawkwind, equally as
> riveting in delivery as in his best work with them, and far far better
> than the last few years' odd contributions to Star Nation and so on have
> been, the blurb supplied with this preview disc may not underestimate when
> it says Ron has never performed like this before. Most of the pieces wind
> up to a vitriol-spitting climax with appropriately frantic guitar and
> other found noise to match.
>
>        Thing is, a personal objection maybe, but though the delivery is
> fabulous, a lot of the words are ones we've heard things like before. By
> my reckoning Ron has been ranting about insects now for nigh on eight
> years without ever having had much to say that couldn't be summarised as
> "Insects! They're all over the place and they're... insectile!" so when
> the first song (and title) song turns out to be more of this the fact that
> it's probably his best piece on the subject, and suitably backed with odd
> and unsettling noises as well as the steady rhythm, doesn't entirely
> remove the hope that it's also his last.
>
>        This is not to say it's all like that though. `Insect Brain' is
> followed by the much stronger `Meat Eater', where Ron runs from a starting
> position ridiculing red-meat-based diets, making of the `meat-eating man'
> an inefficient and messy predator sleeping off his vicarious kill, through
> a brief digression about soldier machismo, through to a marvellous end
> section begun with the phrase `Uh... can I get a refill?' followed by the
> words off the side of a bottle. I don't know what he was reading, I think
> some kind of essential oil compound, but you really really shouldn't drink
> it and the succession of ever nastier-sounding chemical ingredients and
> warnings is perhaps the most successfully-unsettling thing I've ever heard
> him do. Maybe the lesson here is that he should stick to other people's
> words but it's hard to say that when you remember his stuff on Alan
> Davey's _Captured Rotation_ and so on. `Meat Eater', in any case, comes
> back to haunt you a few hours later I find, and the thin chain linking the
> ideas together and the progress of association is inevitably reminiscent
> of another song Ron's sung a lot, Hawkwind's `Assassins of Allah'. This is
> very good stuff and goes a long way to justifying the approach the band
> have chosen.
>
>        The other top stand-out track for me is `Precious'. I couldn't
> really tell you what Ron's going on about here; the point of departure
> might be Lord of the Rings, but he's off on his own almost
> immediately. What makes this stand out apart from the apparent vein of
> inspiration Ron's struck is that for some reason almost alone here the
> rhythm section woke up and for a few minutes you get to hear drummer and
> bassist both performing at full strength. The drummer seems to have got a
> credit here, he deserved one too, it's very good but it does rather leave
> you wishing it had all been like that.
>
>        Notable mention also for Judge Trev's `Me' which though it does
> seem to be a pagan anthem (nothing wrong with that, obviously, that
> wouldn't be wrong with a Christian one anyway) is really quite a good and
> far-ranging one. If his solo album _God and Man_ is all this quality I
> really should own it already.
>
>        All told though this album reminds me of my reaction to Nick
> Saloman's Scorched Earth project. That produced a very fine album, but it
> wasn't the Monster Magnet-like Sabbath-exorcism he was originally talking
> about. The album I hoped they'd make is still to happen. Here too, I feel
> sure more could be done with this band than this, which flips between
> being a Judge Trev solo album and a Ron Tree one. Both are on very good
> form but they don't seem to really tie up, it doesn't feel like a band, it
> feels like session work. What they've done will I suspect wear well, and I
> probably still haven't stressed enough that some bits of it are very good,
> but is this really what these ingredients produce when mixed in a
> studio? I never would have guessed, and I'm still rather hoping for a
> different album even as I find myself spinning this one every few days and
> catching myself chanting snippets from it in places I probably shouldn't
> be.
>
> --
>                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
>    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
>  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
>       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
>       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)
>