'Flying': please sir, can we have some More?

ANTHONY MORE

Flying Doesn't Help (Voiceprint)

I'm always happy when I find an obscure album after years of searching, and it's as good as this little prize. More, whose name usually has another `O' in it, made a couple of German (in tone and label) experimental albums in the early '70s before forming Slapp Happy with then-wife Dagmar Krause and Peter Blegvad. Slapp Happy's brilliant second album, Casablanca Moon, and the even more brilliant album of demos for it, Acnalbasac Noom, are suspended-time snapshots of a deeply skewed pop amalgam, which they cluelessly termed "the Douannier-Rousseau sound." (NME headline: "Blatant eccentrics get record deal.") Unfortunately, Slapp Happy soon merged with the British chamber-experimentalists Henry Cow for two disappointing albums of dull avantisms. More, the most pop-inclined of all of them, dropped out and pursued a non-career, the first product of which is Flying Doesn't Help.

Flying bears no resemblance whatsoever to Henry Cow or Slapp Happy. The clipped, layered studio sound is remarkably close to David Bowie's similarly odd Lodger, but there are actual songs here rather than sketches. Likewise, the edgy vocals and "that-can't-be-a-guitar" sounds echo Brian Eno's first two solo records; yet this album is less decadent, more honest. The pop quotient is amazingly high, but the weirdometer goes off the scale.

It takes exactly two minutes and five seconds to figure out that More wasn't exactly plotting a course for chart ascension. After two fairly reasonable minutes of the catchy if unbelievably British "Judy Get Down," with rhythmic handclaps and melodic guitar shards shooting from all directions, an enormous scratching sound shreds the track: a plane taking off. While the musicians were probably ready to send More to the nuthouse, it makes the entire song. An awful lot of awful noise has been made by rampant experimentalists over the years in such a bland and complacent manner that it's only surprising when they show restraint. More, for the first time since Lou Reed dragged that chair across the floor in "European Son," makes noise exciting again.

Nothing else on the record will convince you that the floor below you has just been demolished, but More keeps playing the crazy alchemist to the hilt. "Ready Ready" is a jagged military song for a minute, before sporting a Beatles chorus and More's verbal fight with himself (the telling Q&A, "Do you remember what you've said? No, I don't know"). "Caught Being in Love" would be gorgeous synth-pop, if More didn't keep deliberately slurring the last word of the title hideously off-key. And a cover of the Happy/Cow collec-tive's "War" (the only "song" on their second album) does the Weill-like song á la David Bowie, with a distorted organ and More's staccato shouting. When the record ends with the Philip Glass-styled instrumental "Twilight, Uxbridge Road," More seems the greatest British eccentric ever, a Syd Barrett-like figure of hopeless projects and bizarre ambitions.

It's all great, it all works--even though none of it should.

--David Auerbach

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