Paul Curreri "The Big Shitty"

Tin Angel Records, 2011

Is this love or is it, uh, confusion?

• Funky, funky rock sounds with a down and dirty vocal, passionate and stream of consciousness lyrics...drums, drums, more drums and funky funky guitar. If you ain't moving, you are dead my friend. This is the controlled chaos, but the bottle's unstoppered and the flow of crazy is running wild into the night. Loping along wolf like, and jumping out of shadows. That's "Nothing's changed on the dance floor". But that's not "The Big Shitty", which crawls across the brain like some paranoid incident.  The funk's dried away instead there's just edginess' razor blade. It's a whole monkey's cage of bananas.

• Oh "Juju", she must be some fine girl to inspire such devotion, even the speed cop can't harm the mood, as with a "hey officer I have somewhere to go" attitude, the rejoinder to "son you think this is pretty goddamn funny?" is "no, just parts of it".

  Young love. That is if juju really is a girl and not a metaphor, there's something of the desperate about "juju know I miss you but juju found a light juju nothing's hurtin' me tonight". How can you not fall for the dazed confusion that is the order of the day on "The Water Tower" ? Like some hidden Nugget, a sixties infected drunken adventure hell bent on ripping order apart and plugging the hole with nebulousness. Glorious, just go with it.

  Where do you go with knives and fruit if you want to dance? "South Tip", which bops slow to a hypnotic semi-raga, as the ashes blow out of the coffee can to float in the water and a young girl and a young boy meet - death and new beginnings and knives and fruit. You're dancing again right, 'cos those too old to dance just complain and cut fruit with the knives as the moon shines down on the drummers. Don't think too hard about it 'cos "some nights are longer than others, when the dawn comes still no wisdom, least not tonight".

  You may say this is just a hippy dream of an album, a mess of meeting tunes, a babbling brook of words and nothing made clear. Lou Reed lyrics, Bowie funk, and the mixing bowl of every Americana trope you care to name. That's it ! That's what it is. Near perfect, isn't it ?