Pet Bottle Ningen’s new album is as defiant as a tricycle whizzing down Mount Everest. Exactly what a hardcore vegan, hot-shit jazz drummer, and Japanese child prodigy should sound like: intense, marginalized, replete with comedic moments of the socially dubious kind, a damn entertaining road trip.
Pet Bottle Ningen is Dave Scanlon (guitar), Dave Miller (drums), Nonoko Yoshida (sax). They are Tzadik artists. There are no if, ands, or buts about this labeling. The Downtown Scene clings to the album’s approach like ectoplasm. However this shout-out is a healthy one, and a proper use for the group’s cybernetic lung capacity and creative mania.
Immense ground is covered beyond this homage. Unique musical gestures splatter the listener, the gestures are daring, demanding, inconsolable. The album rallies a level of precociousness usually only perceivable in performance art and nihilism. All the blasphemous and shocking qualities one attributes to a totally hysterical performance are encompassed by the musical composition itself. Quite a task, more challenging than translating Chinese poetry into English for a team of Russian gymnasts.
What I appreciate most about this album is a uniform emphasis on the Power of Chatter. This is as much a staple of seriously driven contemporary art as it is the music of insects. There is no pity. There is, with virtuosic accuracy, an impressive attempt to cover up – in dense swarms, with fractured itinerary – every song The Cranberries ever wrote.- Valerie Kuehne
