V/A - Remain Alone CS (Disciples, 2021)
UK cassette comp (w/ riso zine) featuring Model Home, Phew, and others loosely reinterpreting the music of Roky Erickson...
"Inspired by the recent ESP Summer album in which the duo of Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive) and Ian Masters (Pale Saints), deconstructed a classic song by the 13th Floor Elevators over the course of four increasingly mutated versions, Disciples invited other musicians from the label roster to also interpret material by the influential Texan psych group. Like the ESP Summer record, the resulting submissions take the source material in a variety of weird and wonderful directions, becoming distinctly their own thing in the process.
Abstract rhythm duo Model Home from Washington DC can be found in surprisingly reflective quasi-ballad mode, creating their own original work from some initial 13th Floor impressions. Pat Cain’s keyboards evoke Suicide circa "Dream Baby Dream", providing an atmospheric bedrock for MC NappyNappa's melancholic commentary, smudged and distorted by auto tune. As Pitchfork recently commented of the group: "Isolating the rhythm at the center of their work and tapping into a new physicality, Model Home find joy in improvisation and liberation in the body."
From there we go to Detroit, Michigan where His Name Is Alive's destroyed rock'n'roll take on pre-Elevators band The Spades’ “We Sell Soul” sounds closer to the avant-garage of late 70s Cleveland bands, or the chainsaw melodies of overlooked 00s band The Hunches, than the classic dreampop 4AD sound that HNIA is usually bracketed with.
We then find ourselves on the outskirts of Tokyo, where post-punk legend Phew, straight off the back off her astonishing New Decade album for Mute, transforms a plaintive Roky Erickson solo cut into an alien transmission for icy electronics, as fittingly dislocated in arrangement as the relationship breakdown described in Roky’s lyrics.
Next we move over to Osaka, where Ian Masters conducts a long distance collaboration with Nick Davidson of Magic Roundabout in Northern England, subject of a recent retrospective on Jack White's Third Man label. The playful fairground organs and martial drums of 3 Eyed Monkey’s take on “Never Another” is a brilliantly spaced out slice of otherworldly pop. Finally, we end as we began, with Model Home is version mode for a dubbed out mainly instrumental re-rub of the opening track." - Disciples