The Most Amazing Century of Science describe themselves as “a modern music ensemble focused on the reconstitution of musics, compositional conciseness, harmonic expressionism and confounding melodic contours. It’s artsy fartsy and one big inside joke. You wouldn’t get it.” That pretty much sums up their latest release, Please, Fill Your Bindle! If you don’t know, a bindle is a hobo’s stick-and-bag carrying device, and MACOS’ record is a layered, zig-zagging hodgepodge of jazz, smatterings of metal, electronic glitches, hiccups and effects, determined to lose you if you try to keep up.
There’s no denying it’s inventive. If you listen to music to hear distinct songs that follow structure and formula, Bindle! is not for you. It forgoes choruses and verses for free-form expression and experimentation. The 10 tracks are brief, one-shot clips of sound whose brevity MACOS attributes to the fact that their ideas aren’t rooted in repetition like so many popular songs, but are more like experiments, comparing their composing to scientific research or laboratory testing. And there’s no refuting that the genre-bending, shape-shifting Please, Fill Your Bindle! is as far away from repetitive as it gets.
They incorporate 5-string bass, glockenspiel, sitar, saxophone, clarinet and sarangi, to name just a few. This instrumentation clashes, producing effects that range from the weird feel of the Twin Peaks score to the jarring and clownish sound effects of a ’70s horror flick made more bizarre with their song titles, like “Arriving Fashionably Late Only to Find The Lot of Their Throats Slit” and “I Put a Pig in the Ground.”
To hear Bindle! it may initially sound improvisational; however, the band says the songs are not composed at random but are premeditated, with as many as 10 performers executing it or as few as three. What gives the record its free-form sonic spirit are the individual performers who each interpret the music differently as they play. Moreover, in order to preserve the integrity of their performances, little was done to tweak and add to the songs once recorded.
Check out the release at themostamazingcenturyofscience.bandcamp.com.
