Jim Strong - My Enemies Are Mine To Keep (2024) [Hi-Res]

Eyes of the Amaryllis's Jim Strong deploys a frangible batch of crackling, wheezing avant-folk-drone vignettes, using DIY instruments to obscure the faintest traces of pop with peculiar tonalities and ratcheting, mechanical rhythms. Properly good - RIYL Thuja, The Shadow Ring, Maths Balance Volumes, Harry Partch.

There's a level of creakiness to 'My Enemies are Mine to Keep' that completely defines it. Strong's arsenal of invented, self-built noisemakers have been heard on his records plenty of times before - whether he's operating solo or with Melkings or Eyes of the Amaryllis - but they're placed under the microscope here. On the genius 'Winds Matri-Local', warbling string sounds bend and shiver next to clockwork ticks and whirrs, and Strong finds the creative space to magick the corrosive background noise into a foundation for a proper song, whispering nebulous melodies into the malaise. There's the suggestion of rhythm on 'Open A Wax Star', but it might as well be a loose, rusty chain swinging from a nearby porch that disrupts the archaic '50s pinball dings that bounce around Strong's folksy murmurs.

Like Maths Balance Volumes, Strong captures the memory, or the essence, of old home recordings, not the songs themselves. He distorts, saturates and obliterates his elements, mangling his voice and various honking, squealing instruments and flattening them to isolate the character of a wax cylinder. And like Graham Lambkin, particularly when he was working as The Shadow Ring, Strong disassembles his ideas as they emerge from the ether, gesturing to more corporeal forms but resisting the temptation to absorb their humdrum structures. It's music that genuinely deserves the label "psychedelic" - Strong doesn't attempt to recreate the aural hallucinations you might dream up after ingesting a few micrograms, but bends his sounds into irregular curves and terrifying reflections. The more you concentrate, the more drama seeps from the edges.

Just flip over to 'til Morning Jogger Prods with Stick', an oil drum swirl of ASMR theater, or 'We Eat Things That People Say', a fragile lullaby that sounds as if it was made on singing saws and boiling kettles and dubbed straight to dictaphone. Strong's occasional bandmate Weyes Blood emerges on the finale 'The Measure', but he still ignores the opportunity to follow any identifiable song forms, harmonizing with her voice and creating a spine-chilling choir that oozes into the cracks between his ferric twangs. It's utterly captivating.

Tracklist:
1 Molehorns
2 Winds Matri-Local
3 Military Music
4 Open A Wax Star
5 Serial Killer Love Story
6 'til Morning Jogger Prods with Stick
7 My Enemies Are Mine To Keep
8 Ancient Porno, Quisquillae
9 We Eat Things That People Say
10 I Took An Errant Shot
11 The Measure