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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Ooey gooey roll of the dice

Crunchy and chewy.

Eric Copeland is the least divisive divisive musician. On some misexecuted day you hear him and think he is, for the best or worst, sui generis.

I landed among the fanatics. I said songs like “Green Burrito,” “Wolfman” and “Alien in a Garbage Dump” were lucid clangor — glass made of metal.

So, some misexecuted evening last summer, I was troubled and transfixed by his “Waco Taco Combo” LP. It ends with the 17-minute “Spangled,” an unmusical rhapsody against which the five other tracks — mostly appallingly competent — seem appallingly perverse.

“Louie Louie Louie” is like one of those other five tracks. Heterogeneous samples and inhumane timbres are dime-a-dozen. It’s the baldness, the formal reserve, that’s disconcerting.

The old Eric, something of a wacko lover boy, is not absent but exceptional — notice the guitar’s plangent fade-out riff. His diabolic mode is primary.

With his intellectual force grows a horrible indifference to pleasure in music. He is not to be trusted.

By Zech Scott

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