THE FOUL-TEMPERED CLAVIER

"The Foul-Tempered Clavier" was written and recorded between 1995 and 1999, and released in 2001. About a 50 minute album with twelve tracks. The two Steve's dedicated this album to Frank Vincent Zappa and they also thank Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, Mike Keneally, Mike Ratledge, Roger Trigaux and Christian Vander. Nice! To quote the liner notes "Our intention with this cd was to create complex "rock" music. We decided after a stern convincing from Mr. Fred Frith that "improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness", to slightly alter our stance on improvised music, and allow a sax solo(brilliantly performed by Dave Newhouse) to be the centrepiece of "Sarahbella" and a "raw" non- overdubbed, free-form drum solo by Steve Gore to stand on it's own. An improvised keyboard solo can be heard on the song "Steve Kretzmer" as well. All else that may sound improvised is not."

These two were hilarious just like the album cover here. I have this sort of love/hate attitude towards their music, I mean I am just really blown away by 1984's "Ridin' On A Bummer" with Newhouse, Frith and Hodgkinson helping out. The several others I've heard just aren't for me. This album comes across as being lightweight mainly due to the toy sounding keyboards, high pitched sounds that aren't my thing at all. Not one song gives me something to hang onto really.

This is a very low 3 stars in my world. Honestly for the most part I just don't "get" this band, but "Ridin' On A Bummer" is part of my "best of" Avant list, so much respect for that. They list mellotron as one of the instruments but Andy at Planetmellotron says it's not real, adding that there's so little of it anyways. Challenging music with plenty of humour.