From the One That Cut You
starts out like a relatively straightforward, if not quite professional,
big-band
jazz
record, only to get progressively stranger and more surreal as it goes on. A portion of the songs -- including the title track, a weepy
country
ballad
parody -- come from a stage production (also entitled "From the One That Cut You") and find
Lane
working a sort of low-rent
Bobby Darin
-meets-sex offender persona. While the self-consciously silly
scat
vocal interlude on
"Fun in the Fundus"
is enough to induce a slight cringe,
and company generally handle the humor aspect with about as much finesse as is possible, and parts -- like the spoken word interlude in the
title track -- are really funny in a disturbing sort of way. The instrumental portions -- which include a shambling
spy rock
tune, a
Captain Beefheart
-evoking
skronk rock
workout
"Mystic Tune,"
and bit of
Art Ensemble of Chicago
-ish improv -- share the same sort of menacing/goofy ambiguity as the vocal numbers do, also revealing more of the ensemble's
avant-garde
underpinnings. The album climaxes with
"Rubber Room,"
a minor-key piano
lounge
that eventually gets overtaken by a mass of squelching, skronking horns, to rather disorienting effect. Taken as a whole,
is such a collision of different elements -- absurd humor, genre parodies,
avant-garde jazz
-derived improvisation, and an almost
no-wave
-like dissonance/attitude at points -- that it really doesn't compare with anything else in terms of sound or sensibility. It's an album destined to appeal only to specialized, unorthodox tastes, but it does have a left-field charm that fans of
Shockabilly
and certain other
Shimmy-Disc
artists, for example, may well be able to relate to. ~ William York