Dwarr
Animals (reissue)
Drag City
These days, recording a
minor masterpiece in your
bedroom is well within
the realm of possibility.
But when South Carolina
plastic factory worker
Duane Warr (aka Dwarr) recorded his spookily
brilliant
Animals in 1986, such an undertaking
took will, resourcefulness, and vision. In
Dwarr’s case, the vision is dark and deeply
personal. And Animals is a disc of absolutely
haunting, home-fried outsider metal that’s
as immediate and unsettling as Syd Barett’s
Opel or any of Robert Johnson’s hazy netherworld
transmissions.
Apart from a hired drummer, Warr played
and recorded all the instruments to a Tascam
8-track. Timpanis, cymbals, bells, and gongs
borrowed from a local high-school marching
band help build an ominous, doomful wall of
clang around psychedelic- and prog-tinged
metal riffs and acerbic lead lines that sound
like
Ummagumma-era Gilmour, Fripp, and
Iommi cut to pieces and glued back together
as some garage-spawned Frankenstein.
Amazing, eerily inspiring, and
super scary!