There's a virtue to scraggly, aggrieved noise that isn't simply nth-generation attempts at
Crass, it has to be said. Formerly New Orleans-based
Impractical Cockpit has been around for almost a decade now, and given the Load label's ever-increasing profile as a home for extremely annoyed/annoying music, the fact that they ended up there for
To Be Treated isn't too surprising. What's nice about the band is that they have a sound that isn't easily reducible to the sum of its parts -- on opening song "Furrowed Frow" there's a high lonesome twang that's as much classic country warbling as it is sun-fried psychedelia, but then that's further buried under so much distortion and open-ended riffing and droning, and even that's only part of what's going on. Something strung out and slow lurks at the heart of the album or at least many of its tracks, but often that's usually something to build on -- shifting to quicker sections as on "No More Strobelight" or "Creeping Giant," with its chaotic feedback scrabble and lengthy horn parts and vocal keens. Elsewhere the mournful combination of trumpet and flute composing most of the brief instrumental "Monkey Tasker" and the equally melancholy echoed brass filling the mix on "Another Back Dome" shows that further restraint certainly exists in the
Impractical Cockpit world, it's just a matter of where it is located. Credit also to the band for a more prose-based lyric style that, even if the words are buried, turns up some winners -- thus from "Passion of a Cop," the opening words: "Officer Whetsone, you're strange for that, drinkin' a bull testosterone derivative." (Then there's "Lat: North 41-53-0, Long: West 70-45-45," which consists entirely of numbers and various echoed sounds, but is far more compelling listening than that description may indicate.) ~ Ned Raggett