Timber

Timber

Parts and Labor 
(Rift Records)
Melody Maker, 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Ain't it peculiar the way that so much of the trendy lo-

fi weirdness that's coming out of the US underground - prime

examples being Truman's Water and God Is My Co-Pilot -

actually sounds a helluva lot like the shambles of Bogshed

and The Shrubs? Once again, there's that funny feeling of

being back in 1986.  But I'm not complaining so long as

there's bands as excellent as Timber. Like Thinkin' Fellers

Union and Cul de Sac, Timber offer the listener a dose of

eclectic shock therapy, an epileptic mish-mash of Fall,

Beefheart, Ubu, and other avant-garage avatars.

What's cool about Timber is that they rarely get so

quirked-out they forfeit "feel" or groove.  Rhythmically

adroit, they can shift from supple to jagged in a trice.

"There's Always 1 & 9", for instance, boogies like ZZ Top

covering "Trout Mask Replica", while samples whizz about

overhead for added mayhem. "At The Same Time" has a happy-go-

lucky, bucolic vibe reminiscent of Meat Puppets' circa "Up On

The Sun": pretty remarkable since the band are from the grimy

Lower East Side of New York, not Arizona.

Timber are pretty fucking versatile. They can do total

noise avalanche Faust-style ("I'm 30, I'm Having a Heart

Attack"), ambient drone-scapes ("The Evidence Is Shifting"),

and dismembered blues ("The Real N.Y."). They add stately

horns to The Blue Orchids' "A Bad Education" (drummer Rick

Brown's previous band Fish & Roses also covered BO's "A Year

With No Head"). I guess the line in "Bad Education" about

"the law of dissipation" was slacker-delia 10 years before

the fact. "Belay That" reminds me that Stump actually had

their moments, believe it or not. The sheer truckin' glory of

"Stupid Reasons" and the mellifluous, manna-from-heavens

blues of "A Passage From Pakistan" are kind of what I always

hoped Grateful Dead would sound like. And Timber have a whole

bunch of "songs" like "Deerslayer" which suffer from a bad

case of Sun (Ra) stroke.

Timber show that instrumental virtuosity and a bit of

learnin' really do help if you want to throw weird shapes,

rather than merely "reinvent the wheel". The UK's inept-and-

proud-of-it nouveau shamblers could afford to take note.  Not

so much pushing the envelope, as putting it through the

shredder and pasting the pieces into a mosaic collage, Timber

turn the avant-garde into a playpen.