Contributed By: McKay
Created On: Friday, 16 November 2007
Hits: 101
 Iodine
Recognition spread with 2004's 'The Function Room' leading to support acts for Hot Chip, The Earlies and Boom Bip, and 'Iodine' takes the flights of surreal songwriting to the junkyard raggle-taggle of percussion, cheap electronics and wheezing accordion, with front-man and key songwriter Kevin Cormack joined by his old Orcadian school friend and producer Jimmy Hogarth. With pastiche songs about chip shops queues, old piers, brylcream, and B & B's, Kevin Cormack explains that the ethos behind the music of Half Cousin is “short, melodic songs made from junk. We're trying to customise things - make music from metal boxes and coat-hangers and bins and wooden spoons".
'Big Chief (The B & B Frequenter)' finds clashing programmed beats augmented by a boulevard, rasping accordion and clarinet with the arcane lyrics - "...there's iodine on the linoleum now...", while 'Jim's Crash Memory' takes the broken piano keys and asthmatic accordion wheeze to create an abstract, merry-go-round of discordia.
'The Absentee' makes full use of technology to deliver a sub-techno/folk bricolage with squiggly doodley programming about the famed absentee down in the front bar, with 'Police Torch' adopting the clashing beats and strange sonics to create a cartoon-reel like Seargent Peppers on mescaline - "...his thoughts are green/ like rotting beams...", and 'Rat Pack Dad' takes the de-tuned piano, beats and programming with clarinet noodle and a kooky song to a well worked conclusion.
Acoustic deliveries are explored with 'Charity' coming across like Elliott Smith, sounding more traditional in arrangement if not execution - what sounds like a sampled warble of bird's nest or chicken coop with a acoustic guitar holding the ruminative melody and faltering rhythm, whilst 'Abide' twists the accent on a Syd Barrett homily - "...And the florescent dustman,/ with his comfort in/ self despite...", and 'The Family Thumb' sounds like The Incredible String Band locked in the studio with Los Amigos Invisibles at 3 a.m. with all the spirits necked, whilst the slumbering accordion of 'Your Name' finds "...his sky is burning at the edges...".
Whereas Tunng and Fence Collective's talent are primarily songwriter's extraordinaire, Half Cousin concoct abstract collage with surreal, inconsequential lyrics with airs of British eccentricity compounded by their geographical remoteness. Unsophisticated programming reminds of a school classroom at times, fashioning a playground weirdness of customised songs that collide and skitter and leave minimal emotional connection, whilst seen from another angle, 'Iodine' is full of tracks that can only be, unmistakably, Half Cousin.
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