The Shadow Ring - Wax-Work Echoes

Blank Forms progress their Shadow Ring reissue series with first time vinyl editions of albums three and four by Folkestone's most abstruse. What to make of these records? What, indeed, to make of The Shadow Ring in general, that most unusual confluence of devolved song craft and evolved thought that time hasn't really made much more sense of and mostly evades any prevailing context. First released in 1996 following a US tour and taking its name from the opening line of their second album, Wax-Work Echoes does at least have some wider ties to a diffuse underground of partially adjacent noisemakers - they'd just toured with Idea Fire Company, Richard Youngs and Vitamin B12 make appearances (as well as Tim Goss joining the band for the first time), and Bruce Russell released it on his Corpus Hermeticum imprint. Yet it still sounds caked in the group's distinct absurdity, featuring quite a lot of songs about mice (literally, figuratively, as metaphor - it's all up for grabs), and the kind of mythology-extending approach to anti-music, convention-baiting sound and overtly amateur playing that's funny (and knowing), alien, and undoubtedly addicting. Why is the confusing cacophony so appealing to me? The answer might just be contained within the words to 'Camel or Carthorse' - "I've got more of this music out back [...] A hit's a hit if it's music or not". Speaking of hits, Hold On To I.D. might well be the Shadow Ring's most well known collection, likely because it was for a long time one of the easier titles to access online, though perhaps also because it marks their relocation to a new H.Q. (ie not the homes of their parents), which was also depicted on the album's front cover. More astute myth-making I'd venture, particularly so when allied with its given title and lyrics about the triviality of low-level bureaucracy, and the everyday filters and measures of identity (i.e. 'Basic Everyday Life', the title track). There's also a lot of references to prawns - I won't try to explain that. Nothing is being played with a straight bat here (though a bat is as likely an instrument as anything else), but there are still songs of sort, what you might argue are roughly conceived in a similar spirit to certain manifestations of The Fall ('C 'n' C-S Mithering' comes to mind for a start) and the NZ underground (which likely explains how Siltbreeze became involved), and they'd not really ever sound exactly like this again. In truth, you've either a taste for this kind of thing or you haven't. I'll not judge either way, though I personally find it impossible to tire of such fuckery. When you're bored of everything else, there's always the Shadow Ring and their uncanny alliance of the sacred and the profane. 
 
FFO: The Fall, The Dead C, Idea Fire Company, Ceramic Hobs, Vitamin B12