Music Review: Boots/C.C./Snake & Remus - Box

This mysterious three-LP box set first appeared in 2006 courtesy of HP Cycle Records. The press materials claim that the original records were privately pressed with very limited distribution and found their way to the label by chance. Any further information about the relationship between the three albums is unclear though it’s apparent they are the work of the same artist (or group). It would be easy for the music collected here to fall short of the expectations created by this kind of mythologizing, but unlike a lot of other “outsider” releases, these records are as listenable as they are strange.

Live at Rainbows End – credited to C.C. – is the strongest and most straightforward record in the set. The first eight tracks are spare, acoustic folk songs; the artist croons dark and impenetrable lyrics over gently plucked acoustic guitar. These tunes might sit well on a mix tape alongside similarly melancholy singer-songwriters like Nick Drake or Elliot Smith, but the darkness here is far more palpable than anything recorded by either of those famously tortured troubadours. The lyrics don’t make much sense, but are filled with sorrowful, sometimes violent imagery. Songs like this can very easily feel overwrought but this album is so frighteningly intimate that any conventional standards of restraint don’t seem to apply.

In its own fractured way, Live at Rainbows End can be pretty catchy, too. The artist never sounds as conventionally pretty as the aforementioned Drake or Smith, but still manages to deliver a consistently captivating performance throughout. I’m tempted to draw comparisons to Syd Barrett’s acid-damaged psych-folk, but further comparisons belie the singularity of this record.

There is a uniquely insular quality to these recordings that I find endlessly fascinating. I’m almost ashamed to say that over the course of a few days I listened to “Worn” – the album’s penultimate track – literally sixty-three times. But not every track on the album bears repeated listening; the ninth and final cut is a fifteen-minute field recording of long periods of tape noise punctuated with some distant voices and slapping sounds. There’s not much happening and I can’t recommend listening to this more than once out of sheer curiosity if you have fifteen minutes you don’t mind giving up.

Article Author: Bryan McKay

Bryan McKay is a freelance media artist, filmmaker, and writer. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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