Dustin Wong’s at it again, and he feels like the long lost friend you didn’t know you loved until they came back. Now, expand and imagine your long lost friend as a droning series of ambient guitar loops with spikes of lightning sharp guitar madness striking through the haze to reveal the empyrean shining through; definitive proof that music is as transcendental as Goethe’s architectural vision would suggest. Music is art unfrozen, and here, in the final quarter of 2013, is an album that embraces the notion with gusto.
Maybe the most beautiful thing about Dustin Wong’s new release, Mediation of Ecstatic Energy, is that it isn’t your dad’s snooty avant-garde. Or, to take the road less traveled, it’s a lot like your dad’s decidedly un-snooty avant-garde. The sparkly playfulness—in intention more than in actual sound—recalls the theatrics of historically revered wierdos like Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart.
But really the most obvious corollary is Wong’s previous band Ponytail (RIP), whose spastic guitar freakouts and mathy madness belayed an intelligence that pierced beyond the apparent limitations of Molly Siegel’s Sue Tompkins-inspired stream-of-conscious shrieking. The result was pure art, sure, but the aim was fun, and fun is exactly what you got. Wong’s solo work—while considerably more controlled and nuanced than most of Ponytail’s output (though not necessarily better)—seems to embrace the same principle. It shreds, without care, the already forced distinction between high and low art, seeing pop’s sensibilities as being a natural route of extension for music that, by its repetitive, droning nature is distinctly unpop.
Wong absolutely knows what he’s doing; look no further than “Out of the Crown Head,” which fiddles with a medley of interlocked staccato plucking guitar loops that all bleed into an infectious, sunshiny soundtrack to a countryside romp. It almost sounds like “Brody Quest.” But then, toward the end, Wong yanks the carpet out and it all shudders on the verge of a harsh noise breakdown—only to immediately leap back into the melody without skipping a beat.
It all blends together into one saccharine, finger-painted mess by the end—only closer “Tall Call Cold Sun” gives into the pressure and shrugs into something resembling a conventional song. Indiscernible falsetto wafts gently over (relatively) stripped down guitar as the tune slowly grinds itself (and the album) to a six minute halt after 14 tracks of pure sugar rush. It’s the perfect closer to a near perfect album.
Rating: A
