S*Glass - Cesspool of the Angels

Hard to believe as it is, Cesspool of the Angels is somehow Seymour Glass' debut solo album. Whether that matters or not is another question entirely, since Glass might be considered the golden rivet of the absurdist American underground, what with his decades-long contributions to Glands of External Secretion, Bren't Lewiis Ensemble et al and, of course, his time at the helm of the good ship/bad egg Bananafish. If we know anything from all that activity - and let's be real, assumptions serve us badly in the world of S. Glass - it's to expect an uneasy ride, and so it goes with Cesspool of the Angels, a record that plays true to its title. This year's Glands of External Secretion LP, Neck Pillow, isn't a bad starting point and i'd take a guess they weren't made too far apart, though here Glass is operating firmly in long-form mode: if Neck Pillow was a diaristic, soundbite unspooling of the grotesque, then Cesspool... is its monstrous Godkilla kin, a post-Negativland collagistic stomping across the American pop culture wasteland that feels like an endless scrolling through public access TV and trash aesthetics amidst an unshifting fever dream. Think Fourth World Magazine, Lambkin, Black Dice and Double Leopards imploded to a pulpy (and Pulp-y) mess of ludicrous abstraction and, guess what, eternal truth. The final track is called 'Rise of The American Asshole', and feels as impossible and inevitable as such a song should: a edited voice exclaims, "i don't like what i don't understand", and with no little veracity. Culture is dead, here's its epitaph.