#bo white

[pierppasolini]

Wakefield Poole’s Bible (1973) // dir. Wakefield Poole

Adamo ed Eva, la prima storia d'amore (1983) // dir. Enzo Doria, Luigi Russo

[bandcampsnoop]

4/5/26.

I'm apparently on a bit of a Ever/Never Records jag. Not intentional, but certainly welcome since I've truly enjoyed both recent LPs from the label that have been covered here.

Patois Counselors are a Charlotte, North Carolina band that have been making music together for over a decade. Their first release was an EP back in 2015. Every release since then has been for Ever/Never. Micah first posted about the band back in 2019 and he referenced both Tripod Jimmie and Pere Ubu in his write-up.

The songs available from "Protection Racket" highlight Bo White's vocals - both melody and the sound of his voice - more than earlier releases. "Cop City" has almost an Edwyn Collins swagger to it. The music however, leans more to post-punk in the vein of Protomartyr and the band's beloved Pere Ubu, Wire and The Fall.

Earlier releases have sounds that make me think of Tropical Fuck Storm and at times the great and underrated Larry Wish.

[dare-g]

Wakefield Poole's Bible!

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Wakefield Poole’s Bible! (1973)

[dustedmagazine]

Patois Counselors — Proper Release (Ever/Never)

“I’ve got a new dance called smashing the fingers. Why don’t you gather round?” posits Patois Counselor’s Bo White, as a no wave sax whinges mosquito-like somewhere in the vicinity of his head. A pause intervenes, about the length of a deep, calming breath, and the band kicks into a chaotic, upheaving, jumping-straight-up-and-down frenzy. The song, “Too Many Digits” comes about halfway through the band’s full-length debut, and if it’s not the high point, it’s one of them. Recorded live with an appreciative audience in a bit over a minute, the cut encapsulates everything that’s great about this ragged post-punk band, the way slack drawled observations give way to rock hard rhythms, that chaotic blurts of detuned keyboards frame insidious fragments of anthemry, that a clanking, wandering bass anchors everything, keeping encroaching chaos at bay.  

Proper Release is Patois Counselors’ first full-length, and it’s strong enough to place the North Carolina-based five-piece in the company of latter-day post-punk bands like Tyvek and Protomartyr and in the lineage of the Fall and Swell Maps. It comes after an intensely (but not widely) appreciated 7” on the Negative Jazz label and a couple of buzzed-about stands at Hopscotch. In addition to a finger-severing dance craze, the album launches a couple of unassailable punk anthems. “Repeat Offender” and “Target Not a Comrade” are about as hooky as this kind of music can be; you haven’t heard this many ear-wormable bangers at one sitting since the Clorox Girls toured with the Observers.

Patois Counselors has a way of flaring from dystopian malaise into full fist pumping certainty, a relentless shove of drums pushing up from strung out poetic contemplation. White mostly chants, but occasionally warbles melodically, elegiacally, murmuring elliptical phrases (in opener “Disconnect Notice”) like “the whiff of a past disgrace…the promise of new blood soon” with a flutter of tune.  Yet the quiet moment is just a brief pause; in a half measure, the band is in rackety flight, shouting the refrain “The bill are unPAID!” Indeed, you want to use an exclamation point when reporting on these songs, so full are they with sudden stunning points of emphasis and blinding, disorienting bits of quiet. Often the bass snakes through the bare parts, rattling up like exposed wiring that makes the songs light up.

There’s plenty of strange stuff here. The loose drift and miasma of “Get Excitement,” with its unstrung boinging bass notes, attains a “Hip Priest”-like aura of psychedelic detachment. (Most of the time, when you say a band sounds like the Fall, you are not talking about “Hip Priest,” so there’s that.) “Terrible Likeness” splices a rickety synth drum rhythm to eerie lines about the alien-ness of one’s own face.  

Yet the best songs capture straight up songfulness dissolving into oddity (or maybe vice versa?). “Making Appts” slants and tilts like a fun-house floor, the spooky irregularity of its instruments sliding relentlessly off center. The guitar slashes come in from weird angles. Rinky dink piano clatters into lurching bass lines. A slurred spate of “la la las” drifts listlessly over the clatter. Yet there’s something compelling about the tension between the marching, strutting rhythms and the sideways slippage of the chant and instruments. Patois Counselor gives structure to entropy, makes sense of guitar-bass-drum-key chaos. Just watch your fingers.  

Jennifer Kelly

[pierppasolini]

Wakefield Poole’s Bible (1973) // dir. Wakefield Poole

[pierppasolini]

Wakefield Poole’s Bible (1973) // dir. Wakefield Poole

[pierppasolini]

Wakefield Poole’s Bible (1973) // dir. Wakefield Poole