Things we like: Lurch Purse, akaKatboy

It's a funny time for music consumers of a certain age, what with vinyl having become a luxury item. As geeked as I am on the Romance of the Artifact, $40 for an LP is out of my league, so recently I've been buying more CDs, but I realize the ecologically responsible way to hear stuff is digitally, and there are loads of worthwhile releases that you won't hear any other way. Of the streaming platforms, Bandcamp seems the least evil, in terms of compensating artists. Indeed, Bandcamp Friday (coming up May 5, August 4, September 1, October 6, November 3, and December 1), when the platform waives its share and artists receive 93% of your entertainment dollar, is the next best thing to the merch table, where you hand your folding green or plastic directly to the artist.

One worthy digital-only release this month is Don't Mess With Lurch Purse, the debut from Lurch Purse, a fiery trio of NYC-based improvisers, released on Kansas City-based Mother Brain Records. I first heard guitarist Max Kutner with the Grandmothers of Invention; he's recently been on a creative roll, releasing albums with the prog-fusion inflected Android Trio and last year's watershed composer's showcase High Flavors. Android Trio has toured with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and Lewis introduced Kutner to his fellow tenorman and occasional collaborator Michael Eaton. Eaton's impressive stylistic range covers modern, free, harmolodic, funk, soul and acid jazz, with collaborators including Dave Liebman, Bern Nix, Calvin Weston, Daniel Carter, and Adam Minkoff (with whom he's performed the music of Stravinsky and Coltrane, among others). The trio is completed by veteran drummer Kevin Shea (Talibam!, Mostly Other People Do the Killing). 

On "Crack Goblins," Eaton unleashes a barrage of '60s-style fire music (he's played Trane's Ascension with Minkoff) while Kutner lays down a bed of skronky dissonance (fitting for one who's toured with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band), Sharrockian chaos-slide, and distorto blasts over Shea's insistent sprung-rhythm clatter. It's bold, bracing stuff; imagine the Stooges' "L.A. Blues" with chops. (Recorded in Huntington Station, Long Island, near where I bought my first copy of Funhouse.) On "Five Years in a Concrete Egg," Lurch Purse undertakes more ruminative explorations which build to a fever pitch that threatens to explode into chaos, like a guitar pedal with a battery that's about to go south. Kutner inhabits the same effects-laden sound world as Nels Cline and Bill Frisell, but is more inclined to go "out" and stay there than either of those players is these days (on records, at least). "Boite de Lune" is, among other things, a drum concerto for Shea, and his running commentary unifies it the way Tony Williams' did "Mademoiselle Mabry" and "Out to Lunch." Better than coffee for opening your eyes first thing in the morning. 

Elsewhere on Bandcamp, akaKatboy is the alias of versatile bassist extraordinaire Matt Hembree. Born on a mountaintop in, um, West Virginia, Hembree grew up in Tennessee, playing in a family bluegrass band a la Charlie Haden. In college, he heard the Ramones and Replacements, and commenced rocking out. Since relocating to Fort Worth in the mid-'80s, he's played funk-metal (Muffinhead), pop-rock (Bindle, Goodwin, Henry the Archer), prog (The Underground Railroad), reggae (Pablo and the Hemphill 7), and various flavors of rock covers (the Odors, the Elf-Men, Stoogeaphilia), and written songs for theatrical productions (Kids Who Care, Teatro de la Rosa).

Hembree started his family late and these days he's mainly Dad, but he's been recording his own songs at home for years and recently, he's been letting some of them out for public hearing. Of the current crop, "It's True" is a bouncy reggae number that wouldn't be out of place in Pablo's repertoire. The prelude from "Concerto for Clarinet, Cello, and Orchestra" is the beginning of a classical piece, composed with orchestrating software. "Good Day" is a charming paean to domesticity and my favorite of the bunch so far (especially with the accompanying video), while the raging rocker "Bomb" sounds more like the work of the bare-chested berserker I used to stand next to onstage with the Stooge band. He's got a new one on the way that has, I swear, the hyper-present intimacy of a Taylor Swift song. It's nice to hear him stretching. I understand he's getting his trombone fixed. Wait till I ask him if he wants to learn Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beast album...