Larry Wish & His Guys – Not From My Come From
First things very much first, a moment to remember those cruelly lost in Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire last week. It shouldn’t of course happen to anyone, but outsiders having to find affordable spaces for their art are often pushed to the very fringes of society and many here have now paid the ultimate price for their passion. The atrocity, in raw terms, is of certain administrations own making and similar structures necessarily exist in almost every town and city. These events may make certain law-makers reconsider their attitudes to cultural policy, but it probably won’t in far too many cases. Grieve for those lost, but be angry in your own time for those that still may be.
That aside, the creative hub in question was exactly the sort of space in which artists on the local Moon Glyph label might have honed their craft, prolific Minneapolis mainstay Adam Werven, aka, in this case, Larry Wish included, should he have been in town. Not From My Come From is his third LP with His Guys, which happens to include a gal, Katelyn Farstad, on drums, as well as Samuel Cramer on bass and, for the first time, Nate Johnson on electric guitar. This is Werven’s project though, one of many, and he’s often a forcibly arty character, at one point in his past releasing a collection of blank tracks, each of them nonetheless carefully named. “I did half the work, now the listener needs to do the other half and come up with the music,” he later explained. Not From My Come From isn’t that far-out a listen, but it is sometimes a challenging one despite revelling for the most part in playful “pop”.
Originally recorded in Werven’s bedroom on 4-track and later overdubbed, the cheap sounding result is born out of nothing more than only being able to draw, as usual, upon the limited resources around him, downright cheesy psychedelic keyboards now something of a Larry Wish calling card. Add to this Werven’s ever divisive, almost unnatural sounding and dark-but-vulnerable baritone and the stage is once again set for a true bout of niche weirdness. Cue louche bursts of lush lounge pop amidst a succession of lengthier shoestring jams. Over forty minutes, meandering freeform stutters in and out of catchy organ arrangement and madcap posturing exactly as it pleases. The kookiness it brings is not really to my taste, but that’s kinda the point. That Werven, his guys and enough others can find fun and fulfilment in an almost willing sense of tastelessness is an artistic statement in itself. Unless you’re in the clique, though, enigmatic track titles included, Not From My Come From can feel at times like you’re on the wrong side of an inside joke.
~Not From My Come From is out now on cassette via Moon Glyph.~