Three Layer Cake's "Sounds the Color of Grounds"

Not writing many record reviews these days, but coming on the heels of Mike Watt's appearance at The Wild Detectives with MSSV a couple of months back, this stunner of a side deserves a little virtual ink. Even 40 years after his Minutemen shipmate's untimely demise, Watt remains "d. boon's bassplayer," and that heritage is writ large in this collection of remotely recorded tracks that Watt and guitarist-banjoist Brandon Seabrook laid down in response to Mike Pride's drum tracks for the second outing by their pandemic-era project Three Layer Cake. It's out June 27 on Stephen Buono's Otherly Love label.

For Sounds the Color of Grounds, Watt laid down his parts on d. boon's birthday (April 1), and composed lyrics in rough sonnet form (ten syllables, 14 lines, three quatrains and a couplet) for his friend, iconic visual artist Raymond Pettibon. The spoken word approach suits Watt's ragged-but-right vocal style, and the flow of his verse recalls his collaboration with poet Dan McGuire in Unknown Instructors. His yeoman bass work shows why he's the model for the plethora of punk-jazz-funksters currently treading the boards. 

As for his bandmates, Pride plays a lot of tuned percussion as well as drums, giving the trio a broad palette of textures and colors. Seabrook's "heavy metal banjo" chops lead the charge out of the gate on the explosive rustic swing of "Deliverdance." "The Hasta Cloth" is harmolodic space rock, while the mutant bebop of "Occluded, Ostracized, and Onanistic" features Pride's mallets to good advantage. "Tchotchkes" abounds with Eastern European echoes, while "Lickspittle Spatter" highlights Seabrook's bowed banjo. Seabrook's last two outings as leader had him helming an octet (2023's Brutalovechamp) and overdubbing solo (last year's Object of Unknown Function). This latest from Three Layer Cake demonstrates the efficacy of the trio as improvising unit.