Review of the new clockcleaner EP...if you like PRF you should pick this up
http://citypaper.com/music/clockcleaner-auf-wiedersehen-1.1047541
At some point in the last dying throes before Philly?s Clockcleaner gave up, it recorded Auf Wiedersehen, which comes a full year and a half after the gloomy racket-punk band?s final show, and even after frontman John Sharkey?s first couple of releases with his new band Puerto Rico Flowers. These four songs, soundtracks for bleak drugs and just-broke-up blackout drinking, feel less belated than a necessary filling-in-the-gaps?where one thing meets the other, and where Clockcleaner?s unhingements and racket get not stripped away but reduced, concentrated into crystalline funeral-punk death march. Music that feels even more creepy and dangerous just for its restraint.
Which describes Puerto Rico Flowers as well?music that goes for full-on goth, drawn-out and tortured in-the-key-of-basement darkwave songs. Likewise, this last bit of Clockcleaner not so much plods along but marches steadily, evenly stepping forward on measured bass heartbeats. Sharkey, as usual, sounds a bit like a lead-lunged, creepy version of Calvin Johnson. But it?s his guitar that really freezes into your brain, a cold and frequently beautiful slow-motion whipping or lashing. It?s a sound traded for synth on the PRF material, and something to be missed. On ?Something on Her Mind,? Clockcleaner dips even some straight-up indie-rock atmosphere on the back of that guitar, glassy and delayed and breaking into a solo you?d even call ?pretty.? Clockcleaner?s almost a world unto itself?as most cult bands are?and, oddly enough, this one short send-off EP might make for its easiest entry point.
For more information visit loadrecords.com. Puerto Rico Flowers plays the Talking Head Oct. 16.
then theres this for all you living under a rock
http://weekly.citypaper.com/Events/e131472/Puerto_Rico_Flowers
Critics Pick...
We Say...
Even the people that hated Clockcleaner, the deceased punk band of Puerto Rico Flowers? progenitor John Sharkey, still seem to have some affection. There aren?t a whole lot of bands, punk or otherwise, that can pull off that kind of belligerence and wide-target fuck you ability. Anyhow, RIP: Sharkey moved to Australia and started making molasses-slow, funeral-black goth-wave music as PRF, which suits his low-register vocals like ashes to an urn. Also: This is the one date PRF is playing in North America this fall or in the foreseeable future. (Michael Byrne)
