Writhing Squares—the Philadelphia based duo of Kevin Nickles and Daniel Provenzano—bely their own spartan approach on their new lp Chart For The Solution, employing bass, horns, and drum machine to intergalactic effect. The outfit brings a sprawling 70-minute affair to the table with patch-working motorik rhythms, ambient synth trances, post-punk dub, and psychedelic shredders.
Writhing Squares — Chart for the Solution (Trouble in Mind)
Chart For The Solution by Writhing Squares
Writhing Square’s latest double LP is expansive in every way. It’s temporally extended, clocking in at 71 minutes in 11 mostly long-form tracks. As in their last album, Out of the Ether, they shoot for infinity in a couple of cuts. The effect-heavy, industrial clanging “The Pillars,” which comes on like a buzz-saw and churns like a Suicide vamp for over 18 minutes, while opener “Rogue Moon” explores every churning, pulsing curve of a mnemonic synth-drum-machine riff. Yet Chart for the Solution is large-scaled in other ways as well; it feels fuller, richer, more overloaded than the previous disc, of which I observed here at Dusted in 2019, “It’s an economical sound, but evocative, with grinding earth-bound vamps of distorted bass battling pinging, euphoric synth and sax overtones and gnomic shouts sheathed in reverb so that they seem to come from inside a dark well.”
As before Writhing Squares is a two-person project, comprised of Philly-area mainstays Kevin Nickles on winds and synth and Daniel Provenzano on bass and vocals. As before they exploit extended, motorik grooves, the certainty and solidity of repetitive rhythms providing a jump-off point for wild excursions in voice, sax, flute and keyboard sounds. “Geisterwaltz” (or “ghost waltz”) whirls in rough, abrasive three-four time, its center holding, barely, as sax trills and chants fly off in centripetal whorls. “NFU,” a highlight, bangs and clangs in heavy four-four, its upbeats massive, hammering assaults, full of buzzing rock electricity. Nickles’ saxophone blurts in oompah blasts, while Dan Balcer from Sparrow Steeple blows the harmonica hard, so that the whole track breathes, in-and-out, like a giant industrial lung. Provenzano plays in Purling Hiss as well, and this cut sounds very much like that band’s heaviest, most psychedelic onslaughts.
“Epilogue” is, perhaps, the densest, funkiest cut, the duo augmented with John Schoemaker on drums and Alex Ward on squalling, squealing, 1960s fusion jazz organ. Nickles switches between sax and flute on this one, both scorching, both infused with heady jazz energies, and the cut opens up in a group improvised free-for-all that is anything but minimalist. Next to it, the scratchy force of “The Abyss Is Never Brighter,” looks like a line drawing next to an impasto oil, both powerful but at different levels of saturation.
The pandemic lockdown has brought us a lot of double albums, and not all of them justify the extra listening time, but Chart for the Solution makes nearly every minute pop. If you’re going to go long, go wild, too.
If one wanted to know what 1971 sounded like — not the world outside so much as the broader weltgeist, especially the male one, with Cold War anxiety and light mystical curiosity mixed with unprocessed feelings about gender roles and a frankly reasonable fear of technological calamity— all transduced into sick octave-fuzz riffs and blasted through a tube amp one could do worse than to consult the archives of the Flower Travellin’ Band. That group, in addition to being extraordinary, leaves palpable historical artifacts of some complex feelings that were powerfully musicalized as hard rock, in similar ways from Tokyo to Birmingham to Los Angeles.
Notably, the ur-sounds of hard rock remain very much with us today, sometimes ironically and other times very seriously, doing different sorts of work for different artists as well as listeners. Writhing Squares, a Philadelphia duo, are firmly in this lineage, particularly with their new album, Mythology. The ethos of 1971 is all over the record’s eight tracks, from hulking guitar ostinatos to patchworks of feedback. There are aesthetic elaborations that harken to other times and ideas, perhaps most notably the occasional seeming reference to hardcore in the vocals as well as the regular presence of the saxophone in a James Chance vein, not to mention synths and drum machines here and there. Mythology is inventively sketched. It is not doctrinally 1971. But it is spiritually kindred to that time, in a palpable way, to the Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori for instance, not to mention Aqualung and Fragile and Master of Reality. It revels in an aesthetic that confesses some vulnerability even as it takes license to scream its emotions as loud as the singer feels like.
The album is for the most part relentless, with nearly all of the tracks anchored by chunky guitar lines that operate like fugal phrases on which saxophone or voice build over time. The exceptions are the third track, “Ferrell,” which recedes into a low-key free jazz space, adding dramatic tension. (This is, as it happens, a move specifically reminiscent of the Flower Travellin’ Band). The other exception, the sixth track (“Chromatophage”), foregrounds bass and a virtuosic messiness in the manner of Sly Stone, another anchor of 1971 and its recognizable microvibe. Aside from these two tracks, though, the album runs at more or less maximum intensity throughout. By the time of the last track, “The Damned Thing,” it is no surprise to encounter an eight-minute jam that marries synth, sax and guitar, often playing the very same riff at the same time, falling into a kind of heavy oblivion, then brought to the finale by a fluttering flute. The shameless and undeniable silliness of that instrument is perhaps the most 1971 moment of all, a baroque gesture that seems to admit a softer side even as it functions as a set-up for one final, evil guitar sortie.
