Panoply Academy Legionnaires
No Dead Time
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Panoply Academy Legionnaires
No Dead Time
Secretly Canadian, 2001
RiYL: Modest Mouse, Devo, Dismemberment Plan |
All the symptoms of an idiot savant; all exhibited by queer as folk vocalist Darin Glenn, lead lambaste shouter for the Panoply Academy Legionnaires. Listening to No Dead Time, the latest PAL record, is slippery and frustrating, like running up an icy spiral staircase or attempting to grab a live, flopping fish with lotion-caked hands.
Your mind will assume the tracks are following a certain structure, then... boom -- an entirely new passage springs from the depths of audio insanity, often in a completely unrelated time signature. From the first twing-twang of the Academy’s guitars, a hearty Modest Mouse influence can be felt with every gratuitous pitch bend. Bassist Nick Quagliara refuses to simply plod along behind the axe wielding guitarists, flipping the four-string script with dizzying fret fluctuations.
If the Wicked Witch of the East took four helium hits and two yellowjackets, she might equal the uncouth babbling of Glenn, Panoply’s possessed ringleader. His unprecedented mastery of the drunken songbird vocal style accompanies the arrangements perfectly, as he snorts and sniffles through entire conglomerations of sounds which often dissolve and materialize in different forms throughout each number.
The only audible weakness hindering No Dead Time is the unrelenting insistence of every entry; there is no intermission; there are no gaps. Each track is the raging antithesis of every pop song ever constructed, and the whole package just might wear the “traditional” listener out. Of course, mental patients don’t often have much time to buy records...
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