Editions Mego – EMEGO 207
It has been roughly 10 years since Thighpaulsandra’s last solo album,
which is notable because it definitely feels like an entire decade-long
backlog of ideas has been poured into this sprawling and overstuffed
release. Fits of great inspiration, masterful songcraft, baroque
orchestration, meandering filler, and plenty of very ill-conceived
motifs all tirelessly vie for their moment in the sun over the course of
an exhausting 2-hour tour de force of intermittently wonderful and
oft-grueling excess. The Golden Communion is simultaneously a
celebration of the joys of unfettered imagination and the perils of
complete creative freedom. There is probably an absolutely perfect LP
buried in here somewhere, but Thighpaulsandra certainly does not make it
easy to find.
The Golden Communion might be single most bizarre and uncategorizable
album that I have yet heard in my entire career of music criticism, as
it is simultaneously hugely ambitious and absolutely impossible to
figure out what exactly Thighpaulsandra was trying to achieve. This
album is all over the place and nearly impossible to categorize. That
said, The Quietus amusingly compared it to an Andrew Lloyd Webber rock
musical, which certainly seems apt, if unintentionally cruel. To me, it
feels more like an intended career-defining opus by an artist intent on
making a huge statement, yet constantly derailed by
multiple-personality disorder, resulting in endless jarring shifts in
tone and vision. I have no idea if that kaleidoscopic aesthetic was by
design or not, but Communion nevertheless does feel like the work of
several different artists with very different visions. The personality
that I like best (The Sophisticated '80s Pop Visionary) sadly surfaces
in earnest just once (in the sinuous and burbling "The Foot Garden").
He does not even manage to turn up for the entire song either, as the
piece opens with over 4 minutes of hallucinatory and discordant
electronic meandering (the Mad Scientist personality?) before the actual
song kicks in. Once it actually comes together, however, it is
absolutely wonderful, resembling the best song that David Sylvian never
wrote...
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