Wonderfully tossed together

Pride of Lowell - Pride of Lowell
Dirty Pillows

Pride of Lowell is not in the song business—they're in the mindfuck business. Got that? The minimalist duo of Patrick Breiner (tenor saxophone, clarinet) and Max Goldman (drums) churn out maximum chaos. Each instrument complements and combats the other; horns woo drums, drums fuck horns, horns and drums squabble, drums and horns make up. I want to say the pair channel the spirit of James Chance or maybe Ornette Coleman, except it's not really channeling. It's more like strangling.

Pride of Lowell's punk-jazz improvisations sound wonderfully tossed together. Like a standard, linear song was written and then the individual notes were cut from the sheet music and assembled in random sequences and pasted to a piece of paper, so that the sheet music took on the appearance of a ransom note constructed from snipped-out magazine letters.

At one point, Breiner's tenor sax made a deep, flatulence-like sound that was akin to the air being slowly let out of the universe and I thought, "If this is it, if this is the end, I will expire content."