I Love You (Dora Lee) is the new 38-minute opus from NYC’s VaVatican, out now on NNA Tapes. The four-piece, featuring members of Cloud Becomes Your Hand, play a blend of melted jazz, spacey electronic tweaking, and general experimentation all combined into an improvised post-something-or-other (post-jazz?). The album’s absurdist art-rock progresses through noise, ambient, electroacoustic, post-rock, and jazz passages but centers on a seemingly free-association spoken-word piece around the 13½-minute mark. This section highlights the album’s Burroughs-like cut-up approach while making the Theater of the Absurd aesthetic its most apparent quality—all that’s missing is for one of the band members to turn into a rhinoceros onstage during live performances. While tonally and thematically this forms the climax of the album, I Love You (Dora Lee) continues to build until it culminates in the final absurdity, a cover of Elvis’s I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You. If free jazz has gotten too tame for your liking, VaVatican might just be up your alley.
“DSM” showcases the many individual styles of Brockton’s Van Buren Records
It has been a fruitful 18 months for the Brockton super-collective Van Buren Records. Their two 2021 records, Bad For Press and Black Wall…