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Album Review
by SashaS
23-1-2003
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| Camper Van Beethoven's 'Tusk' |
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Camper Van Beethoven: 'Tusk'
(Cooking Vinyl)
Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Tusk’ tape recovery
Talking about being at the right time in the wrong place, or it should be some other waysround? Nonetheless, my awareness of the Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Tusk’ album being released occurred upon seeing a review in a Miami daily and thought, as many years ago when it had been canned – what an exercise in futility. Upon returning home I find the CD in my pillarbox-sized letterbox and discover it to be an enjoyable exercise in… creative psychosis? Swell, despite never being a particular fan of the band that authored the pieces.
Remaking the entirety of Fleetwood Mac’s bizarre ‘Task’ album was a strange move, even by alternative radio standards back in the 1980s. But, in 1987, when college radio faves Camper Van Beethoven cut ‘Tusk’ in a makeshift cabin studio, the idea seemed… probably, inspired. It came to be due to the fact that band members got snowed in the drummer Chrispy Derson parent’s holiday home in a ski resort of Mammoth and the Mac’s disc was one of the five or six albums that were around the house. (The band failed to disclose what the others were.)
Anyway, the original ‘Tusk’ was a definition of the ‘70s excess: the double-album set of often-experimental music was recorded at a then-astronomical cost of $1 million and ate up some two years of studio time. For the difference, CVB cut all 20 songs from the LP in a few days on a shoestring budget using items (sounding) like a Speak-and-Spell toy plunking out the lyrics to Stevie Nicks’s ‘Sisters Of The Moon’ and recording Christine McVie’s ‘Honey Hi’ in Spanish, reputedly on a busy Tijuana street corner.
The tapes had been lost since they were recorded, until… “In February 2000 Greg Lisher,” the band’s statement informs us, “found the tapes in a storeroom at his parents shop. The band had a listen to them and decided that it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, there was an oddly contemporary sound to the recording. Of course the tapes were badly damaged and required some reconstructing. Two iBooks, a G4 and the week between Christmas and New Year 2001 put it all back together. Some elements had to be added. We have not tried to disguise them. For instance in iBook covers for the lost vox on ‘Sisters’. Some heavy looping is employed to create full songs out of a couple that were fragments. Otherwise it is what it is. And it’s something of which the band is proud.”
CVB had disbanded and some of its members formed the now defunct Cracker before reuniting last year. Some of this, like the group’s vocally off-key take on the hit ‘Sara’ and a noise-some version of Lindsey Buckingham’s ‘That’s All For Everyone’, certainly challenges one’s hearing but there are more straightforward readings of ‘Storms’, ‘Over And Over’ and ‘Walk A Thin Line’ that are aurally appealing.
On the whole, this ‘Tusk’ is one of those kitschy so-bad-it’s-good items and is considerably more interesting and imaginative than the big-budget, mega-star cash-in ‘Rumours’ tribute album that was released a few years back.
7/10
SashaS
23-1-2003
Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Tusk’ is released 27 Jan. 2003 on Cooking Vinyl
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