A few weeks ago, I reviewed Dripping’s Disintegration of Thought Patterns During a Synthetic Mind Traveling Bliss, a strange, counter cultural slam classic that finally led to me pulling the plug on abolishing scores for our Crypts of the Unknown format. Disintegration… is the kind of album that could never be anything but a cult classic — weird, thorny and singular, and so ambitious that the musicians’ budget and production capabilities are insufficient to live up to its lofty goals. Dripping has not done much since, although a single released just last year might suggest that more new music is on the horizon — a beautiful side effect of the internet age is that cult classics can be revived and live on. The musicians have not been lazy, either way. Or rather, Ed Morris, a relatively new addition to Dripping who now seems to be one of its main creative forces, has not. Vacant Moley is a solo project by Morris that, in any way but name, just seems like more Dripping, only that I can hear the material well, this time.
Vacant Moley might not have the underground charm, but, in most ways, I would actually consider The Programmed Obsolescence of Your Kind to be superior to Disintegration of Thought Patterns During a Synthetic Mind Traveling Bliss. Admittedly, part of that is due to it being shorter and thus more palatable, but Vacant Moley also benefits from production being more accessible. While a lot of the sonic experiments of Disintegration were well-intended and often uniquely clever for a slam album, as a whole Dripping spinned it as more of a collage more than a cohesive piece of art. In this time, crazy ideas can shine, and, in an age of non-destructive audio editing, it is possible to fine tune, repair and experiment at your own, likely drug-induced pace.
A primary selling point of Vacant Moley (and Dripping, for that matter) is the project’s sense of humor. Drums get pushed to absurd extremes with kicks freqently playing so fast that they turn into a metallic bass synth of sorts. This EP also makes more than one excursion into other genres that are as outlandish as they are humorous. Morris seems to really enjoy electronic music, both noisy and more mainstream styles, and it’s these excursions that really work for the first time. Nods to hip hop, EDM, glitch, and trance find a home in The Programmed Obsolescence. Here, they’re not merely jokey cutaway gags as they have been in the past. I’ve been particularly impressed by “Cranial Amputee”, a track that manages the tightrope walk of quoting the early melodic patterns in the later slam section while maintaining the relative authenticity of both. Sections like these show that not only has the production quality improved, but that the newly recruited Morris could be a real boon to future Dripping releases. Dripping might be an oddity, but Vacant Moley’s little EP makes me hopeful that the songwriter’s main outlet can also deliver when a full-length finally hits. In this post-ironic age of internet meme-ery, Dripping and Vacant Moley might just be the type of bands we need more of.
