by request
review
[+]
Possibly one of the strangest -- and most interesting -- guitar pop albums of the late 1990s, Buddy Judge's
first solo project (titled, in full Mister Spalding's Orchestral
Devices Proudly Perform Buddy Judge's Full-Length Musical Compendium
"Profiles in Clownhenge") sounds almost nothing like his previous work
with the Grays. As one of the three frontmen in that project, Judge's songs blended seamlessly with those of Jason Falkner and Jon Brion,
and despite some adventurous flourishes, the song writing on that album
was fairly conventional guitar pop fare. On this album, however, Judge
gets pretty weird: the concept is that the music is inspired by a late
19th century Boston bookkeeper named Mr. Spalding, who created an
orchestra of mechanical animal musicians run on steam power. Mr.
Spalding was a bit of a recluse who died when the orchestral device's
main boiler exploded, also destroying all of his devices. This album is
recorded in that particular style -- sounding a bit like a circus gone
mad -- making it possibly one of the only tuba-based pop records in
memory. What's surprising is that even with the inherent weirdness, Profiles in Clownhenge
is still basically a pop album, just with tuba taking the prominent
role generally taken by a guitar. So that means that songs like the
infectious "Everybody Loves Bob" and a very literal cover of "Send in
the Clowns" aren't too weird to scare pop fans away, but are plenty
different enough to establish this as a truly creatively unmatched
project. (There are four bonus tracks tacked on after the main section
of the album. Those songs are more traditional guitar-based numbers that
won't surprise fans of Judge's other work.)
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