The 1980 Listening Post - The Late Bronze Age - Outside Looking Out

 Reviewed by Paul J Zickler / LISTENING POST DISCOVERY

Released: 1980 The Late Bronze Age Outside Looking Out Genre: Experimental Southern Jazz Prog Rock Fusion Rating: 4.25 out of 5 Highlights: Fat Brooms Brush the Number Bush Farmers Earn Livings Pen Pals Diminished Rehearsals for Fainting Oh MAN, it’s another edition of Colonel Bruce Hampton (Retired) and the Late Bronze Age, and I am here for it! For those who missed the last review (from 1982), suffice to say, Bruce is a crazy bastard surrounded by a bunch of skilled players who can noodle right up to the edge of cacophony whilst laying down a groove you can boogie to. I really dug Isles of Langerhan. In fact, I made a Spotify playlist that included all the Hampton songs I could find from the pre-Aquarium Rescue Unit era. Outside Looking Out was included on the playlist, but I didn’t really acknowledge it as an album per se. I did notice fewer rocking guitar sounds and more flutes and horns, but that's pretty vague. I decided to go deeper. Here then, a rundown of the ten songs as released in 1980. 1. NCO Housing opens with some proggy flute, then the relentless rocking commences, along with a Middle Eastern sounding violin, and Col. Bruce lays down some lines about Non-Commissioned Officer housing and its shortcomings. Just kidding. It’s really goes, “Bulldozer broke the silent fall / Abbreviated arms throughout.” They do repeat “NCO Housing” several times at the end, if that helps. 2. King Greed: Funky beats and funkier horns glide on through, as the breaks drift toward Steely Dan territory, Double tracked vocals remind us that “I straddled the equator with a canister of sentiment.” 3. A Stained Soul calls to mind the sunny side of Beefheart, but the stop/start rhythms and clashing sax solos take us further out. I’m blissed out when all the horns solo at once and the piano goes cuckoo behind them, but those moments are fleeting. If anything, this one doesn’t travel close enough to that jagged edge. 4. Fat Brooms Brush the Number Bush could have made it onto Dr. Demento’s radio show, right between Bonzo Dog and Weird Al. The music is all fake samba and lounge electric piano, while the vocals are just looney tunes. “Fat Brooms brush the number bush / Pass on learned jokes… Push the sacraments around tonight / The average demand.” At the two minute mark, the violin takes a frantic half-spoken solo, and of course it all fades out right in the middle of a verse. 5. Farmers Earn Livings weds tabla with Fender Rhodes to outstanding effect. Close your eyes and try to count the instruments — it can’t be done. Multiple acoustic guitars, cellos, alto saxes, violins, oboes, and clarinets drift in and out while the Colonel instructs the masses: “Driving the wedges of huge stone into cradle like bottoms / Smelting paragraph texts in the crucible expedition / The dreadful task masters drop composted straw material / So you take care of your flock / Farmers earn livings along valleys.” I’ve never dropped acid or taken mushrooms, but with music like this in the world, I don’t feel the need. 6. The Late Bronze Age has an almost classic rock bass line, but with oboe counterpoint instead of weedly guitar. The beat is insistent, punctuated by bells and slithering saxophone. The chorus is almost a sing along! “Late Bronze Age / Millstone sinking to the nether world of Earth.” Far out. 7. Pen Pals Diminished would be a great song to throw into your favorite disco playlist. It’s smooth and danceable, if you don’t mind dancing to a Pere Ubu sounding vocal with batshit crazy lyrics. I mean, if you’re shaking your booty, who cares? And that piano solo at the end is frantically gorgeous. 8. One important consideration for perusing music by avant grade leaning musicians is that the short songs often feel the longest. When In Doubt Go Completely Out is two minutes and four seconds long, but there is no discernible melody, verse, or musical structure to hold onto. Instead, voices yell at you out of every crack and crevice of the backwards guitar, treated piano and bent percussion. Beware. 9. Merged Moons starts out sounding like The Muppet Show theme or a Van Dyke Parks tune, until the crooked Latin percussion kicks in. Jazz fusion flute propels the middle eight bars, returning later with even more verve. The lyrics read like some kind of twisted warning label. “Dramatic symptoms can be caused by emptiness of policy. Psychic blurs in some windows of agitation.” 10. Rehearsals for Fainting (Been False Accused) trips along above a high speed bass line that’s almost jolly. After a verse, a Dixie-tinged voice (probably Billy McPherson) narrates a political scene from wonderland. “The ministers administrated the administration to the congressional legislative body, and the senate approved bills signed by the legislature. The office vetoed moralities and the party platform. The magistrate and the council general declared me legally par after the effect wore four damn radial tires!” This goes on for several minutes, until it starts to make a bizarre kind of sense, particularly when periodically punctuated by the shouted word “Moonshine!” There’s a bonus track on the CD, a nine minute collage of voices, psychedelic guitar, and jazz drumming. It’s certainly not necessary to the Late Bronze Age experience, but it doesn’t hurt. It features Col. Bruce describing the album’s content thusly: “It’s gonna be country music. Not sure which country. Pretty much inside country music. There is no in, and there is no out. There used to be. If there is no past, there are no problems, and the future is the crux. Then there can be no now. That is now.” I couldn’t put it any better than that.