Imagine a gaudy van filled with hippies, hurtling down a turbulent road with no brakes and a lot of mushrooms, and you might have the gist of Dark Meat. A pack of road warriors out of Georgia, with a tendency to jam oodles of sound into tight spaces.
The thing about this band of merrymaking weirdos is that it can be difficult to tell where things start and stop. The crew was initially 30 people strong before dwindling down to a mean 18-piece outfit. With the release of Truce Opium back in October of this year, it was rumoured that Dark Meat was only boasting a lean band of nine members to flog their brand of psychedelic oddity.
Believe it or not, Dark Meat began things as a Neil Young cover band and somehow collected members like a giant ball of snow rolling down a hill and collecting things like houses, horses and lawn darts. Their live shows were spectacles, as you might imagine, resembling the agitated joy of Flaming Lips and the colossal madness of Polyphonic Spree.
Jim McHugh is the ringleader of this circus of the strange, writing the songs and rigging the blissful explosives with his wacky vocals. His presence is that of a cult leader, piling his cheery band of folks into the church van and back out on to the road for another escapade.
Truce Opium benefits from a leaner band somewhat, as one can actually differentiate different instruments (sometimes) amid the ring of noise emanating from this nutty nonet.
In the end, as weird and bizarre as a band might be, their music still has to matter. In the case of Dark Meat, their import is tied up almost entirely in their bulk. It is, unfortunately, the size of the band that appears to be the biggest feature and the songs suffer as a result. They become busy quickly, losing any pace or groove to a bunch of instruments jockeying for position like sugared pre-schoolers trying to astound their parents with kazoos and recorders.
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