LARYNX AND CLAW
Short review by David Hackbridge Johnson
Larynx
and Claw are Scott Batty, vocals and Alexandre Garcia, classical guitar. They
have a new album out on bandcamp called Tuning
Ether. I know Batty from his
startling artworks, often featuring humanoid cut-outs deprived of their eyes,
staring blindly out of a curious background that sometimes looks like concrete,
at other times like bubble gum. He is
working right at the edge of what constitutes the human figure in a landscape
alien to its thriving. Musically a
similar territory is being explored. Batty
doesn't so much sing as whisper into the microphone a series of baleful and
obsessive lyrics centering on the activities of flies and other small
irritants. A lugworm insinuates itself
into the cerebral cortex. There is an
unhealthy focus on the sun-cream-spattered neck of a neighbour – a kind of climate-change
voyeurism as the clock calls time on human endeavours. Batty is the larynx frayed by experience,
indicating in its hoarse implications that it has shouted itself out in
previous vocal pyrotechnics, and is now with bitter experience ready to impart
a secret message. He has crafted ballads
devoid of easy sentiment. Alexandre
Garcia is the lyre-strumming claw that sets the lyrics within a series of
nostalgic loops that could almost be from southern Spain. Taken together one might term their style
post-punk-melancholia. It is what you
get in the wake of punk's anarchy – a sort of apocalyptic exhaustion. In poetry it would be broken syntax and
fragmentary images no longer seeking the totality of sense. As the final song on the album says ‘it's a
mystic, mythic hangover’ – after the raging of punk's desperation here is a new
intimacy where through very quiet music a different audience is reached. The music will find an audience who are alive
to its hidden and hypnotic appeal.