Gomi Kuzu Can is the new album from JeGong, the collaborative project of Dahm Majuri Cipolla from Mono and Reto Mäder from Sum of R, and there’s something charmingly retro about the band’s third offering, something to put listeners in mind of the hum of an old CRT TV, or that warm and slightly fuzzy sound of a tape recording and the pop and crackle of a well-loved LP. Musical influences on this album range from Ultravox to Tangerine Dream with a little Joy Division and Kraftwerk sprinkled in to create an album of thumping, machine-like melodies and industrial precision.
The polish is even more impressive when you discover that, rather than a controlled, clinical studio recording, JeGong opted to record this one live. That adds an extra layer to the depth of music on display here as well as arguably adding a new weight to the instrumentation that’s missing from a lot of overly-polished and safe studio albums. Everything here is slightly crisper, punchier than you might find in a lot of studio albums and you can easily picture hands dancing over keys, working all these instruments in real time, never missing a beat or a cue. It’s a sort of rough and ready, experimental approach that amplifies the lo-fi, analogue atmosphere the duo are going for here or, as they put it, creating “a kind of memory box where you can store recollections”.
Large parts of this album, especially tracks like ‘What Ever Happened to Gene’, with its slow, plodding melody and vocals, sound like they could have been unearthed from some mouldering cardboard box, tucked away at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. The krautrock influences are front and centre here, even more so than previous offering The Complex Inbetween, which leaned a little more towards the post-rock side of things than Gomi Kuzu Can does. Here you’ll find everything from the chiptune-esque shrill of ‘Golden Hairs Goes Back to Japan’ to the bass-driven, Sleaford Mods-esque ‘Outright Wolf Medicines’.
It’s an album to be experienced, and definitely one that benefits from repeated listens, to really immerse yourself in everything it has to offer. An exploration of sound that wouldn’t feel out of place in everything from a noir thriller to a sci-fi epic. It’s a beautiful, flowing exploration, an experimental delve into music and rhythm that’s sometimes angry and discordant (‘Contortion’), and other times sounds like it might have snuck out of one of those cheesy 1970’s instructional videos they used to show in schools (‘Obaachan Bingo’).
Gomi Kuzu Can is, in summary, a deeply weird album and another excellent offering from JeGong that’s sure to please fans hungry for more of their particular brand of musical oddity. It’s never quite what you expect from one moment to the next, sometimes completely changing genre halfway through a track. Grab your best set of headphones, your drink of choice, and sit down to give this album the time and attention it deserves.