This Cat Eats Suns by Terminator Jeans
Terminator Jeans is the most engrossing, progressive, and spiritually satisfying musical collaboration ever in the history of the human race.
Except it isn’t, that’s just how they describe themselves on Bandcamp. They’re a krauty jam-band playing ten-minute-long, drums/bass/guitar/synth jobs with either ‘Terminator’, ‘Terminate’ or ‘Jeans’ in the title.
“Will You Please Remove Your Jeans” could sound threatening if spoken, depending on how it’s delivered. If it was said to you the way it plays out on the album, you’d probably give in even though initially you’d be quite rightly reluctant. The same request being made over and over for thirteen minutes, gradually speeding up and getting harder to ignore. ‘I don’t want to take my jeans off’ you’d think, but the noodlefuzzy bassline won’t quit and eventually your hips join in giving it all that Shakira business and then the guitar starts a-soloing and then gets all glitchysamply and the drummer is laying his or her (credited only as Dave Power, so it’s hard guess a gender) business down on the floor toms all your inhibitions have slid down your leg and onto the floor.
You regain your senses and find out you’ve actually woken up in the next tune. You took off your jeans ages ago and you realise you’re lost in the jeans museum on the moon. Rather appropriately the song you’ve woken up in is called “Lost In The Jeans Museum On The Moon”. A more experimental affair altogether with a strong hint of pre-dancefloortastic Black Dice or some of the non-canonical (not quite the correct phrase but you know what I’m on about) EPs Sonic Youth used to make to suss out who was actually paying attention. Anyway yet again you get lost all up in the groove and you don’t realise that you’re actually listening to still another track. This whole thing is playing you like the chump you are and the slut you want to be.
Yeah you’ve heard this kind of stuff before and it’s one of those forms of music that’s so easy to do that a million bands have done it badly, but Terminator Jeans are smart enough that when one of them wants to wig out the others keep the ship sailing in the right direction.
“Imagine Aladdin Was A Terminator” gets things moving in much freer direction, proving the end of the last paragraph to be somewhat…. wrong. Give it a few minutes though. Give it ten minutes and thirty two seconds even. It’s some nice rhythmic dilly-dallying and quite at odds with “Terminate Your Eyes”. Don’t know what’s going on with this one. All fuzzy bass bluster but it cuts out really abruptly and cuts back in sounding like a totally different song. I’m blaming computers on this bullshit.
“The Factory Where Terminators Are Made” brings back the trippier freeform stuff for a few minutes then goes all noisywoisy for a bit before Dave Power throws his/her finest Bonham-esque moves before the whole thing melts down bleepidybloopidy. I keep thinking about long-distance lorry driving...
Bobby Harnett.
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