Bill Orcutt, “My Restless Parts,” A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Palilalia, 2009)
When Orcutt was part of the vicious noise-assault known as Harry Pussy, this type of soul-baring deconstructed acoustic playing, massively stark and personal, may not have been considered possible. But that band’s concentration of punk, free jazz, noise, industrial, and pure aggression was a template for Orcutt’s recent solo LP. From 1992-97, Harry Pussy ran over audiences. On A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Orcutt takes his unbridled power and applies it to acoustic guitar, a Kay stripped of two of its strings: a constricted snake of taut muscle that crushes your speakers.
A lot has been made of the record (in The Wire and elsewhere) and deservedly so. The Wire had it as #3 and Mapsadaisical had it as #4 on their Best of 2009 lists. (I hope you can access this letter by Christopher Riggs to The Wire denouncing Edward Pouncey’s review.) But it is hard to categorize something like this. And hard to write about it. And hard to convince someone it is good. You’re either going to accept the beast or throw up your hands. If sales are any indication, the original limited pressing by Orcutt’s own Palilalia label disappeared faster than Orcutt can break a low E string. It has since been reissued, but you still may have a hard time tracking down a copy (note: this is a vinyl-only release).
I’ve taken my time with it. Not said or written much, other than telling people, “you’ve got to hear this record.” Got to. You really need to hear it. If you care about yourself and want to grow, this is important. Because it will confront you: and that’s just what you need. So long as you can have an unmediated relationship with it—forget the rhetoric. Fuck You, Counselor summed up the situation very well: “All the other critics seem to harp on the violence, the destruction, so easily gleaned from a record made by one-half of Harry Pussy. They all kind of read like PR sheets, too, which is just as unsurprising as it is disappointing, because this is a pretty personal record. Slapping all that marketing rhetoric on it just ain’t couth, if you ask me.”
Calling the LP an “exorcism” also seems dead on: it is an exorcism for Orcutt, for each listener and for culture (whatever that is). Instead of being tortured by academic gibberish (see Pouncey-Riggs above), maybe this album can serve as a means to rip apart our expectations of what a guitar is, what performance is, what recording is (listen to the air conditioner all over it), what a review is. But that is a big burden for a solo LP put out on a small label. Maybe we should just listen to it.
I don’t know what this album is “about” any more than I know what a Jackson Pollock painting is “about.” Or what Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is “about.” Looking for meaning leads to a lot of frustrations. Why not stop that search and try to have an experience once in a while. Just have the damn experience. And stop thinking about it. As I’ve said, “You’ve got to hear this record.”
Watch a video clip (hosted The Wire) of Orcutt playing. Read an interview with Orcutt on Foxy Digitalis.
