Fred Lane - From the One Who Cut You (1982) [Hi-Res]

From the One That Cut You starts out like a relatively straightforward, if not quite professional, big-band jazz record, only to get progressively stranger and more surreal as it goes on. A portion of the songs — including the title track, a weepy country ballad parody — come from a stage production (also entitled "From the One That Cut You") and find Lane working a sort of low-rent Bobby Darin-meets-sex offender persona. While the self-consciously silly scat vocal interlude on "Fun in the Fundus" is enough to induce a slight cringe, Lane and company generally handle the humor aspect with about as much finesse as is possible, and parts — like the spoken word interlude in the country ballad title track — are really funny in a disturbing sort of way. The instrumental portions — which include a shambling spy rock tune, a Captain Beefheart-evoking skronk rock workout "Mystic Tune," and bit of Art Ensemble of Chicago-ish improv — share the same sort of menacing/goofy ambiguity as the vocal numbers do, also revealing more of the ensemble's avant-garde underpinnings. The album climaxes with "Rubber Room," a minor-key piano lounge ballad that eventually gets overtaken by a mass of squelching, skronking horns, to rather disorienting effect. Taken as a whole, From the One That Cut You is such a collision of different elements — absurd humor, genre parodies, avant-garde jazz-derived improvisation, and an almost no-wave-like dissonance/attitude at points — that it really doesn't compare with anything else in terms of sound or sensibility. It's an album destined to appeal only to specialized, unorthodox tastes, but it does have a left-field charm that fans of Shockabilly and certain other Shimmy-Disc artists, for example, may well be able to relate to. ~ William York

Tracklist:
1.01 - Fred Lane - Fun in the Fundus (4:59)
1.02 - Fred Lane - Danger is My Beer (3:14)
1.03 - Fred Lane - I Talk to My Haircut (3:34)
1.04 - Fred Lane - From the One That Cut You (3:07)
1.05 - Fred Lane - Rubber Room (6:43)
1.06 - Fred Lane - Mystic Tune (6:23)
1.07 - Fred Lane - Oatmeal (2:43)
1.08 - Fred Lane - Meat Clamp Conduit (1:43)