Thursday, September 18, 2008

Review: Neil Michael Haggerty and The Howling Hex


The Howling Hex Earth Junk

(Drag City)

J.Milo





Iconoclastic trailblazer, Neil Michael Haggery, manages somehow to open up even more imaginative trunks of weirdly-shimmying, cracked-grin agitations with this organ-heavy record, his 9th release under the Howling Hex moniker.


It’s a dreamy little float down paranoid lanes littered with dejected ice cream truck drivers and fire-riddled picnic tables – Haggerty flexes his mastery of creating a slightly upsetting or on-edge sensibility while still constructing enough of a hook to keep you listening. The singer/guitarist also played in distinctive experimental southern-style spook-punk projects Pussy Galore and Royal Trux, and has been residing in New Mexico (only a half-hour’s drive from the border) for some time now – and these strange bouncing ditties reflect that ranchero flavor blipped into eerie waltzes and Haggerty’s straight-from-the-poet’s-notebook verbal wrangling.


It goes from the bizarre circus-pop of “Big Chief Big Wheel” (with Haggerty chanting la-la-la’s over a ghostly shredded guitar) to the nerve-wracking gurgle n claw of “Annie Get Redzy” to dreamy desert-road-cruising instrumental “Contraband & Betrayal” to effectively enticing pop-and-folk tunes like “No Good Reason” (with sweet affecting back up vocals from Eleanor Whitmore) and closer “O Why, Sports Coat?” No drums…no true steady rhythm – save the ever-coaxing warble of Sweney Tidball’s fender rhodes and synthesizer and the howl of this gaunt, doe-eyed mad scientist.



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