The Orkney Island’s Kevin Cormack likes listening to musicians who challenge the functions of specific instruments, those who try to make other objects into musical instruments. It’s a simple enough wish. Why have the same old tired samples coupled with the same old tired riffing coupled with the same old tired drum-kit when you can make a pleasing enough racket with a washboard, a badly tuned guitar, a suitcase and a box of cornflakes?
With the exception of the Animal Collective’s similar rag and bone collection of magic bean acoustica, ‘Sung Tongs’ Half Cousin’s idiosyncratic brand of ‘short melodic songs made from junk’ does indeed sound like no other record released this year. A penchant for ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘unwanted’ instruments ensure that tracks like ‘Country Cassette’ and ‘Half Turn’ riddle and weave a tortuous if utterly beguiling way through the uncharted territories of pop. Broken break beats abound – played out on hammers, table-tops, fuzz boxes and biscuit tins as opposed to your average Dell laptop – discordant organ sounds leap unexpectedly from the shadows – man-handled accordions drift and flourish – harmonies drop in and drop out with little or no warning – and non-specific horn sections pop, parp and fidget. And then there’s the tunes. Just as you thinking that ‘Function Rooms’ might amount to little more than a short, amusing distraction in an otherwise predictable landscape of punk-punk pogoing and agitated dancing, tracks like ‘On The Way Down’, ‘Mrs Pilling’ and ‘Hindsight’ reveal Cormack to be a craftsman of surprising grace and beauty. Recalling the soft, velvet purring of Elliot Smith and a ‘Songbook’ period Paul Simon, Half Cousin’s quieter moments glow like warm, delicious embers beneath a hotpot of crazy ramblings and fuzzy madness. It’s pop alright, but pop that has been sometimes horribly, sometimes beautifully disfigured.
Pure class in an effortless pre-Have You Fed The Fish? badly drawn kind of way.