Laundry - Blacktongue

Taken from Metal Hammer.


Tobias Hawkins was the founding member of Counting Crows, and Tim 'Herb' Alexander used to drum with arch weirdos Primus. A more unnatural union than this would be hard to imagine.

This bizarre pairing seems especially amplified since the San Francisco-based Laundry roll out under the banner of 'art music'-that ambiguous category that most musicians would surely avoid deliberately pigeonholing themselves in. The Primus influence is obvious, but how does the mellower Tom Petty half manifest itself? Answer: it doesn't.

Laundry are, at best, incoherent. Stuttering, disjointed shards of melody are booted here, there and everywhere by the razor-sharp back beat.

'Canvas' opens with what sounds like an awfully big kitty purring rhythmically into the mic before coming on like Dali's Car (Pete Murhpy and Mick Karn's serious musical strangeling). '19' is a talk through someone's thought patterns a la Heads Up, and the rest of the tracks are much of an 'artful' muchness.

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