General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners – General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners [2005; Ipecac Recordings]

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In this one-off collaboration between Mike Patton and turntablist crew The X-Ecutioners, the two forces collide in a storm of beats, samples, energized vocals, and lengthy track titles.  Patton’s singing rolls from low growls up through casual delivery and into hyper howling, while names like “Precision Guided Needle-Dropping And Larynx Munitions (Pgndlm)” and “L.O.L.–!Loser On Line! (Hate The Player, Hate The Game)” mesh militaristic, musical, and computer imagery to match the songs’ flavors. 

Pulling vocal samples from war films, Dolemite, kung-fu fights, and other sources, while scrambling together too many musical slices to ID, the X-Ecutioners come off as doing the heavy lifting by a wide margin, and infuse the album with a broad range of flavors in the process.  While modernized electro and alternative hip-hop are the most common factors, dance, funk, breakbeat, illbient, and assorted other tastes get dropped in, even if for only a few seconds a go, making the 23-track song-list easy to tolerate, particularly with most of them running less than two minutes.  Fun and creative, and just long enough to feel like the team-up touched on everything needed.

Purge Solenoid – Blind Auspice [2012; self-released]

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On their first EP, the Californian group of Purge Solenoid demonstrate their oddly-flavored take on prog rock, coming off as something like Zappa fans with less emphasis on the guitar.  The weird vocals don’t hurt that impression, but the drummer’s whole-hearted attempts to steal the show do pull the group further in other directions, and the slather of psychedelic effects on the strings help gel a firmer sense of the group’s own character with their bouncing fervor.  Twists through stronger jazz riffings, along with use of the guitar to under- and counter-score the drums’ rhythms. give the music a nicely dizzying effect, and the band’s confidence to close with a ~9-minute song (”Nebulous”), it made all the more appreciable by their talented execution of it.  A very impressive debut, with lots of little details to pick out and savor in repeated listenings.