Renaldo & the Loaf - 1987 - The Elbow Is Taboo

 

Ralph Records – RR87081  192.09MB FLAC The Elbow Is Taboo sounds like Renaldo & the Loaf discovering more advanced equipment and immediately finding ways to make it behave incorrectly. Recorded across several years and expanded from four-track methods to eight-track recording, drum-machine programming, primitive sampling and digital delay, the album is cleaner than their earlier work without becoming more conventional. Its surfaces are sharper, its arrangements more spacious and its rhythms more deliberate, yet every technical improvement is redirected toward the duo’s private mixture of folk music, malformed cabaret and domestic surrealism. “A Street Called Straight” opens with a slow, detuned procession built from dulcimer, drums, bouzouki, synthetic tones and voices that seem to occupy different physical spaces. The arrangement keeps changing shape without losing its heavy forward motion. Acoustic instruments supply much of the color, but digital effects detach them from ordinary performance. Notes repeat unnaturally, percussion arrives with mechanical precision and familiar timbres are transformed into parts of an imaginary ensemble. The cover of Ptôse’s “Boule!” demonstrates how easily Renaldo & the Loaf could absorb another group’s material. Kalimba, percussion, twelve-string guitar and theatrical vocals give the song a bright, almost playful surface, though the repetition gradually becomes compulsive. It is recognizable as a cover while sounding completely at home among the duo’s invented rituals. The title piece is compact and richly textured, placing mandolin, bouzouki, harmonica and Egyptian drums against randomly generated electronic rhythms. The contrast does not feel like folk instrumentation pasted onto modern technology. Both elements seem equally archaic and futuristic, as though the machines and hand-played instruments belong to the same nonexistent tradition. “Hambu Hodo” is the album’s most expansive construction. Bass, clarinet, guitar, sampler and Casio keyboard are layered into a slowly mutating procession. The primitive sampling technology required individual notes to be triggered and assembled manually, particularly in the clarinet passage near the end. That painstaking process gives the music an odd stiffness: the arrangement resembles an orchestra reconstructed from tiny recorded fragments, each one forced into place. Brief pieces such as “Dance for Somnambulists” provide delicate interruptions, using glockenspiel and sparse instrumental gestures to create miniature nocturnal scenes. Elsewhere, “Here’s to the Oblong Boys” turns hammered and fuzzed guitar into a lurching celebration, while “The Bread Song” brings bowed koto, acoustic guitar and bouzouki into one of the record’s stranger ceremonial moods. Voices remain central throughout, shifting between singing, recitation, caricature and private language. The Elbow Is Taboo became the final album of Renaldo & the Loaf’s original period, and it carries the density of a project pushed toward exhaustion. Its extended production did not smooth away the duo’s eccentricity; it allowed them to construct it with greater precision. Earlier records often sound like discoveries made through limitation. This one sounds deliberately engineered, with every misplaced accent, distorted instrument and impossible vocal arrangement positioned carefully. The result is their most technologically developed early album, but also one of their most acoustic and tactile. Wood, wire, breath, metal and tape remain audible beneath the digital processing. The Elbow Is Taboo does not abandon the handmade world of the earlier records. It enlarges that world until it resembles a complete culture, equipped with its own dances, ceremonies, street songs and inexplicable prohibitions.