When percussionist Andy Steele washed up on La Grande’s fabled golden
shores, songwriters Gregory Rawlins, Jeff Grammer, and Wayne Callahan had
been collaborating for the better part of the previous decade. In bands Sons of
Guns, Test Audiences, and Correspondence School, the three had explored the
delicacies of folk, feistiness of rock, and ethereal soundscapes to regional
acclaim. But it became the addition of Steele — harboring as much of a stylistic
affinity with Elvin Jones as John Bonham — that enabled each musician to
realize their respective visions, culminating in a sound both unprecedented, and
drenched in the travails of the past. Seemingly overnight, Catskills was born.
The quartet’s debut full-length, “Rufus Dufur” was recorded in a weekend by Bart
Budwig at the OK Theater in Enterprise, Oregon. Each song was performed live,
ranging in length from a radio friendly three minutes to the sprawling abstraction
“Callahoo” which clocks in at just over eleven. In the session’s closing hours,
singer/guitarist Rawlins laid down the entirety of the album’s vocals — evident its
utter deterioration during the garage punk romp “Polygon Man.”
Some say the band’s songs are of a cinematic bent, were that work of cinema to
include space, werewolves, and leaflets riddled with cryptic, unsettling
propaganda — sailing down from a purple sky with mauve thunder
(spike-shouldered transients thawing their contused knuckles over a rusted burn
barrel below). Drones of meditative tranquility give way to locomotive grooves,
then implode into all-out bestial derangement, making their art some warped
amalgam of bands like Swans, Neu!, The Stooges, and Butthole Surfers.
Grammer floats phantasmic between theramin and synth, layering sometimes
pastoral, sometimes ghoulish sheens over each number, while Callahan’s bass
work bears all the sly simplicity and sexual enticement of Klaus Voorman’s
Plastic Ono days. Cutting across the sonic canvas goes Rawlins and his 1965
Fender Jaguar, primitive and on parole —angular, infectious phrases gleaming
from the deep like a bed of lost and rusting lures. And further down still, in the
earth and beyond its plain, is the indomitable pulse of Andy Steele.
Elated and despondent, delivered and imperiled, brimming over with romantic
notions of pastures aplenty and overflowing with the extract of pure, heartfelt
loathing.
Come coincide.