Review Summary: NO GUITARS ON THIS ALBUM...'CAUSE PIANO ATE EM :[
Matt Stephens makes music for people who are over music but still love it. People who have heard it all. People looking for a sequel to music, if you will. Effluence is just one of the projects he uses to further this vision. It's probably the best one, but they are all pretty great. Pianistic Dismemberment is his fourth fully realized attempt at putting music in a blender and shitting it out after a long, difficult digestion. He used to use guitars, but this time they are gone because the piano ate them. Now its just drums, horns, pianos, and long, drawn out grunts. It's all very cool; brilliant even.
What Matt Stephens understands about extreme music is that it should be funny. Music like this should make you laugh; it is inherently absurd. But that's why it must exist. Too many musicians try to push boundaries by being annoyingly serious about it. Humans are stupid so why should our art be any different? The smartest thing you can do is not care about most things and do stuff that makes you laugh and smile.
Pianistic Dismemberment will make you laugh and smile. There are parts where you will go "hell yeah" because the nasty piano riff gets gnarly and groovy. There are parts that will make you laugh because no one has thought to make something sound like that and then do the next thing it does. There are parts what will make you smile because clearly the man knows exactly what he is doing and is having so much fun doing it. It's all very loud and overwhelming but in a way that will make you happy and perhaps even make you giggle.
If you want to hear music that mostly doesn't sound like other music but in a way that avoids making you roll your eyes while asking yourself how much money this guys parents spent to send him to BRIT School or NYU, then listen to Effluence's new album Pianistic Dismemberment. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You might even fart. And you'll have a great time, which is all you can really ask for anymore.
