A few steps on the kick bass and a couple of simultaneous snaps of the snare and crash invite the listener into the drowsy, fuzzy sounds of Stark Reality’s 1970 release, The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop.
This double vinyl album was re-released by the hip-hop label Stones Throw in 2003 as Now, for they felt that this rare existence must be brought to those anticipating ears, who were awaiting such glorious music to be brought from the depths of time’s lost archives.
According to the liner notes written by Stones Throw artist Egon, he comments about what Stones Throw DJ and executive producer Peanut Butter Wolf said as he walked in on Egon’s listening experience, “now this is the kind of music that should be reissued.”
The concept of this album is funny and a bit genius. They took a children’s album that songwriter Hoagy Carmichael had written and interpreted those songs in their own twisted way.
The sounds are a bit of twisted junk. Not junk as in a useless object that should be thrown into a trash can, but shedding that negative concept of junk and meaning to explain music that sounds a bit jazzy and funky at the same time.
The vibraphones played by Monty Stark combined with the wah-wahing guitar picks of John Abercrombie have the capability of sending your head to the furthest reaches of the cosmic spectrum, yet the steady drumming of Vinnie Johnson and the popping bass of Phil Morrison keep your feet planted in the ground.
Although “Bustin’ Out of Doors” is a bit of musical travel as they have no intentions of leaving you here with this song.
That is just the music. Throw in the idea of these distorted sounds combined with lyrics that are teaching the listener the months of the year, or talking about an old grandfather clock sitting there and ticking, adds a completely different dimension to this album. Other songs include the concepts of childlike dreams and the lesson of the musical scale. Upon listening to the lyrics of the songs and to the instrumentation of the music, it’s funny to hear their interpretation with the original words. On more than one occasion they take a sort of tongue-in-cheek approach when adding their music to Carmichael’s lyrics, because the music speaks in a double meaning way that some words and phrases have.
This album is a weird little catch and it grows with every listen.