Kissing the Bald Spot (2002)
ostensibly a collection of out-takes and one-offs that i finally compiled in july of 2002 (only to get rid of the CHILDREN HAVE NO EYES -era solo tracks and replace them with more PG stuff a few years later, which is something i still need to finish doing), this manages to work surprisingly well as an album, and it might even be one of our more consistent cds. while gord and i were trying to figure out how to continue following the death of guys with dicks, i thought i’d check out some of the unused tracks from the PAPER CHEST HAIR sessions, because there were quite a few things we had recorded that didn’t end up on the album. i was shocked at how good some of them were, and i couldn’t believe i hadn’t deemed them album material in the first place. i guess there were simply too many songs and i chose to eject some of the stranger things we had recorded instead of putting together another double cd. we also recorded a lot of things later on that never ended up on any proper albums because GWD had all but taken over, and the last papa ghostface songs ever recorded are here, with c’mon as fitting an epitaph as one could ask for. it’s somehow one of the most menacing things we ever did with just an acoustic 10-string guitar and gord and i singing (i’m playing with delay in real-time to make it sound at times like there’s more than one of me), and my scream at the end is still one of my favourite things i’ve ever done with my voice. gord scared the hell out of me in the middle of the song when he started singing while i was in the middle of my brain trance, snapping me out of it momentarily, hence my cry of, “oh, jesus! jesus christ!”
the rest takes in everything from serene instrumentals (xmas on venus, which borders on ambient with my impressionistic piano and gord coaxing some truly alien sounds out of a synthesizer, and leaving home with a pickle in my pocket, which sounds like happy campfire music), to a song about holding a man hostage in an abandoned warehouse, feeding him stale bread, surgically removing his feet and then forcing him to eat them (eat it up), to the self-explanatory mama had to kill me ’cause my hair was too long, another one that was written as a country song and morphed into something quite different at the recording stage. there’s also gay animal rights, which is the closest i ever came to writing a protest song, and all profits generated by the single were used to aid the sexually ambiguous animal coalition (SAAC). mannequin is another one of those messed up songs that’s difficult to describe, sounding something like what the brain of a chihuahua might look like while in a coma, and featuring the long-overdue reappearance of gord’s gourd—a strange little instrument that looked something like an indian guitar with dental floss for strings, which had only ever been used on one PG song before (screaming nipples). even the stuff that’s sort of throwaway like the fragment she tries to hide and my ten-second guitar riff that ends the album all seems to fit.
all in all, i think this makes for a satisfying ending to the PG story, even if it’s technically a posthumous one. someday, knife fucking chocolate will be played at weddings.
TRACKS:
the street that got laid
eat it up
leaving home with a pickle in my pocket
c’mon
jiklönne
knife fucking chocolate
gay animal rights
xmas on venus
mama had to kill me ’cause my hair was too long
she tries to hide
dirty reflection
we was dead
mannequin
johnny’s fuzzy riff
STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
