RASCAL REPORTERS – Dux In A Row
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Most people thinking about old progressive rock come up with the typical names like Yes, King Crimson, Genesis and a couple more. Then there are those great very unknown bands like Yezda Urfa or England that only a very few select people have ever come across. And finally there is Rascal Reporters, the best progressive rock band that you might never even have heard of. Honestly, I discovered them only a few years back when they were recommended to me on my music streaming service (despite all that is evil about these services, at least they help you hear hitherto unheard artists). Rascal Reporters were founded in the mid to late seventies by Steve Kretzmer and Steve Gore, who shared songwriting duties and instrumental performances among each other. After two obscure cassette tapes released in 1980, they followed with their two most acclaimed albums Ridin’ On A Bummer (1984) and Happy Accidents (1988). Purple Entrapment was their only album from the nineties, with the next decade seeing the release of The Foul-Tempered Clavier and The Mind Boggles, the latter being mostly written by Steve Gore, as Steve Kretzmer had sort of retired from the band. In 2009 Steve Gore unexpectedly died, which was the preliminary end of the band. Steve Kretzmer surprisingly revived Rascal Reporters in 2018 and released a single featuring members of Univers Zero and Homunculus Res. The following year, Rascal Reporters became once again a duo, with the younger James Strain from Ireland completing the line-up. While working on their next longplayer The Strainge Case of Steve, which eventually was released on the legendary Cuneiform label in 2023, Steve Kretzmer also unearthed some unfinished demos of songs that he handed over to James Strain to complete them into actual tracks. The result were two albums, Redux Vol. 1 in 2019 and Redux Vol. 2 in 2021, released on their own record label. After the release of The Strainge Case of Steve, James Strain felt like putting the two Redux albums together on one album, which became Dux In A Row on the áMARXE record label. The material was once again remixed and partly altered to make the songs works as belonging on the same album. After this long introduction, you wonder what can be the interest in a lost material album from an obscure progressive rock band that hardly no one ever heard of. This was also my first thought. And yet, after only cursorily listening to the album, I was surprised at how wonderful these hidden gems sound. The band’s main albums always had a very strong Rock In Opposition flair. They even had Henry Cow’s very own Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson guesting on Ridin’ On A Bummer. Another huge influence has always been Frank Zappa, from the compositional approach to the strange and twisted sense of humour. Earlier influences were Soft Machine and the whole Canterbury scene, and that is what is finally getting highlighted on Dux In A Row. The song order has been shuffled in order to make the listening experience as suspenseful as possible. The short Improv Cost Me My Job is followed by One Of Our Dogs Is Missing, an upbeat instrumental jazz prog piece that is more Zappy than Canterbury. Up next is the sixteen-and-a-half-minute long Cashew Medley, a track that must have been stitched together from different places, showing of James Strain’s incredible talent for making the final result sound like an epic, varied prog suite full of weird sounds, great vocal parts and unusual song structures. In fact there are more vocal parts on this retrospective album that on all of their regular albums combined. Her Kind is for instance a very unusual jumpy psych pop song that sounds more like late sixties than the band’s usual Canterbury In Opposition sound. Further long tracks like Moments (9 minutes), Egg Soup (10 minutes) and Hubert Greenery Pack (14 minutes) take us deep into the progressive mind of Rascal Reporters, while the shorter songs switch between pop moments (Fallen Mind), jazzy psych rock (The Unfettered Way) and dance prog (Egos Explode), the latter taking advantage of James Strain’s modern production skills. If you buy the digital version of Dux In A Row, you get the best place to start discovering the vast landscape of Rascal Reporters’ discography. It is here where the band is at their most accessible, despite often sounding more avantgarde and daring than most other progressive rock bands. If you decide to spend a little more on the CD version, you get as a bonus that latest album The Strainge Case of Steve, which contains sixteen songs at nearly eighty minutes running time. That album is also quite accessible, and apart from a few select vocal contributions (the highlight being Le Grand Sbam’s Jessica Martin Maresco on Uh Oh (Lait Suspendu Fermenté)), is mostly an instrumental effort. Once you have listened your way through these two and a half hours of astounding prog jazz avant rock, I bet you won’t wait to make it through the band’s remaining repertoire. |
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11 songs |
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76:59 minutes |
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***** ***** |
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Genre: progressive rock Label: áMARXE |
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