Hailed
by some reviewers as “commercial suicide”, Unsavoury
Products is a unique project in today’s musical context.
Based on the work of Beat guru William S. Burroughs and
following his cut-up technique, the album was assembled
by Black Dog’s Ken Downie and Scottish poet Black Sifichi,
now expatriated in Paris, over a few months, both artists
throwing ideas at each other, giving a very organic structure
to the album.
Unsavoury Product is apparently not the follow
up to 1996’s brilliant Black Dog’s Music for Adverts
(And Short Films), but a break-away project allowing
two artists with more connections than could first be
expected to expend on common grounds. If the music is
a prolongation of Downie’s previous work, the presence
of Black Sifichi on each of the twenty tracks gives an
altogether different dimension to his work. Although each
track is independent, it is in its entirety that Unsavoury
Products reveals its bizarre beauty. Feeding on the
perversions of society, from the expectancy of the public
(What Do They Want? where Black Sifichi reflects
on the complexity of being creative) to the anonymity
of push-button services (Mental Health Hotline),
this album is an unsettling piece of modern poetry. Safichi’s
voice and sometimes-altered diction, superposed onto the
multi-faceted Black Dog compositions, creates a rather
intriguing atmospheric and absurd tale of urban misery.
Faithful to the spirit of Burroughs’s work, Unsavoury
Products often displays a twisted and disturbing
sense of humour, from the dog-man paranoia of Dogbite
and Secret Biscuit to the irrationality of the
Wishing Well or Pigeon Chest. And this
is the real strength of this piece of work. More than
the intimacy between music and spoken words, it is the
comedy element contained here that relieves from the weight
of the project. Utterly disparate and yet incredibly intense,
Unsavoury Products proves to be one of the most
fascinating records released in recent months. Not since
the collection of Chris Morris sketches released a couple
of years ago, although for different reasons, has nonsense
seemed so appealing.
More than a reflection on the world we live in, Black
Dog and Black Sifichi offer here a vision of a society
too eager to forget simple things. The motives behind
Unsavoury Products are however more down-to-earth.
Both artists have embarked on an exploration of the interactions
between their respective art form and sources of inspiration
by emulating each other over a long period of time, and
seemed to have, for the time being at least reached the
culminating point of their collaborative work.
5/5 |
