CD Review

Chris Chandler & The Convenience Store Troubadours
Hell Toupé
(Prime-CD, 1999)

Chris Chandler and his zany crew simply can't be captured on disc. But you can't blame them for trying. The rants and meditations that make up this new disc continue Chandler's trademark combination of cosmic satire and down-home folk wisdom, delivered with all the subtlety of a county circus. One of the stand-out tracks, "G Chord/Vibrations," gets moving like this:

What does a fly hear when it flies through a room where Mozart is playing?
What beautiful music surrounds us at every moment of every day that we do not hear?
It occurs to me that everything is made of molecules that are vibrating
forever undulating
Like Jacques Brel and Ma Rainey,
Johnny Cash and all of Motown.....

All the spoken tracks feature well-chosen musical backdrops, some custom made by the troupe, others brought in like serendipitous found objects - like rap samples. "I Wanna Be Like You" becomes the appropriate foil for the story of Theodore, the radical ape who first walked erect, and Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" magnifies the metaphor of life as an interminable dental appointment. The soundscape created by trumpet, drums, rhythm guitar and Laura Freeman's faux-pop vocals is oddly familiar in a Twilight Zone kind of way as Chandler's over the top poems turn the entire mundane reality of millenial America into one long fluorescent-light-lit Walmart aisle.
-HB