The Dimorphodons’ ‘Waui’: “Where Pop Gets Weird”
This is a rather strange sounding but ultimately very fine album, largely created and played out by the mind of Hand Of Glory producer Will Twynham.
It’s been around for a few months now garnering a bunch of critically favourable reviews as renown grows. The project involved various other singers and players throughout the entire process from tape to vinyl but the songs I believe are all Twynham creations. Let’s start with the sound of the thing which is, almost, like nothing else you’ll have probably heard, or at least not for a very long time. Almost every track here sounds like it has been recorded in another universe, like20,000 leagues under the sea. Sometimes it’s just a slight wibble wobble which presents itself somewhere in the overall mix but which, nonetheless, alters the feel of everything else, and other times it feels like every instrument has been affected / effected so that your ears / brain has to adjust, to reach down into some appositely positioned celestial cave in order to correctly receive the signals. In that respect — or maybe it’s just me – especially with regard to the vocals or (at times) the deciphering of lyrics, things can prove to be quite challenging — some tracks in certain passages brings to mind the work of artists such as the Telescopes, as they’ve re-appeared in recent decades, or even Gong, while the odd vocal inflection may also recall Kevin Ayers.
The trajectory of some of the songs too travel in a not-quite so linear wayin comparison to what might be considered uhhmm normal, or usual, that is to say each doesn’t necessarily follow the expected / cliched verse / chorus fashion, although, oddly enough, some kind of do. Are you confused yet?
Anyhow, in amongst all the audio fog and other such extracellular obfuscations, pleasantly weird things are going on, with little lighthouses of song hope which have made it safely from the storm out at sea to land safely in the harbour of something approaching near-normality. For instance, the pattern of the expansive ‘Land Over Sea’ and eyes wide, sky-calling ‘Gondwanaland’ proffer some of the early mad bounce of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, while ‘Every Animal’, the genre-crossing ‘Slave To Rough’ and the likes of album closer ‘I Held The Monster Back’ resemble a more modern (?) reimagining of those weird independent label releases from the late 70s and early 80s such as you would only hear if you’d tuned your wireless in to the John Peel show. “I was simply trying to make an album of pop songs”, revealed Twynham in the promo hype ahead of the album’s release, “but things got weird along the way.” It’s psychedelic Norma but maybe just not as we know it.
And isn’t that what such terminology is supposed to be all about, expanding boundaries and tearing down barriers; this does both!
Lenny Helsing
