When enough isn’t enough, that’s when you get AB1’s railing follow-up to AB1's debut CD Mom By Dad On Crystal Sunshine, you get Half A Face and Some other Things-- ‘rewarded’ with a split release CD (by Centsless Prod.) and cassette (by Whale Trap which could seriously contain some bonus on CD material) that I just realized, between coverage of DADDY on …Thwart! and this review… much of the points I want to make concerning my reintroduction into the ExperiMENTAl music scene of Cincinnati may be hit upon… But still… AB1, who is also guilty for the backing ‘music’ for Brandishing The Future (also by Centsless Prod.) isn’t going away anytime soon. Half A Face proves that point. Its gonna take something stronger than the stuff you buy at the stores to make this go away if even at all. The main factors that I will continually mention when covering this Cincinnati No Wave or No-Fi scene or whatever in the hell it wants to be called (with ‘NO’ meaning NOISE-IE) are here: resilience, confidence and creativity are all here AGAIN! Face is a collection of moments. A soundtrack for their moments. As brutally honest as sound may get. Eating chips, a wondering coherent sober mind… A drunken mind-fuck… A bad day, a good day, a imaginative dream. Peer inside Ab1s head for a sonic journey of ‘what the fuck Just happened? Don’t worry; Face is designed to make you think once, twice and hell, maybe even more times if you truly try hard enough. With a militarized slant coming to me bluntly from the song titles alone, Face could be the only audio documentation of the moment before total encompassing war that destroys everything of which I would be perfectly fine with. ‘Future man’ (fuck that guy) stuck with the laborious task of defining what the world was like through the blackened goggles of conceptual sound just before the end of everything as we know it, will have his work cut out for him if just listening to the 13+ minute ‘hidden track’ itself. Will there one day be fossil MP3’s? Discovered and speculated upon for cultural significance? I hope so for the sake of AB1 and all of mankind.Centsless Productions
Whale Trap Records