Funeral Mountain
1990 Feralette Records, CD/Cassette
Produced by Price Harrison
Recorded and mixed by Rick Will
Lyrics by Joe Lapsley, music by Neighborhood Texture Jam
All tracks recorded at Sixteenth Avenue Sound, Nashville, TN
All tracks mixed (Rick Will) and mastered (Ken Love) at MasterMix, Nashville, TN
Additional engineering by Dave Parker
Assistant engineering by Greg Parker
Production assistance by John Butterworth and John Sheridan
Art direction by Price Harrison
Graphic design by Bez Ocko
Photography by Price Harrison
Thanks to: Sixty-Nine Tribe, Wino Herd, Think As Incas, Leisure Kings, Anzio Complex, Davis McCain, Doug Easley, WEVL, WLYX (r.i.p.), Pop Culture Press and Mrs. Mount.
Special thanks to: Ed Scott, Carter Green, Sloan Wilson, Mark Harrison, Price, John and all at Feralette, Rick Will, William Grabbe, Esquire.
All tracks published by Pocahantas Moonbeam Music BMI
Performers:
Joe Lapsley: vocals, harmonica
Tee Cloar: guitar, bass on "Looking For Heroin"
Tom Murphy: guitar
Steven Conn: bass
Paul Buchignani: drums, texture
Greg Easterly: texture
Guests:
Mark Harrison - guitar on "Looking For Heroin", texture
Derek Van Lynn - saxophone on "Heroin" and "Bitch"
Rick Will - texture
John Sheridan - texture
Track Listing:
- Borax Factory
- Environmental Song
- Mall Boutique
- Old South
- The Big Johnson
- Don't Get Loud With Me, Bitch
- Bikers
- Running From Miami
- Looking For Heroin
- Torsos Of Murdered People
Reviews:
Alternative Press:
These guys don't seem to be experimental utilizers of found sound, as their name might suggest (despite the fact two of the members are credited with "texture" as if it were a specific musical instrument). If you take it a little differently, though, Neighborhood Texture Jam really isn't a misnomer; they do sound like a bunch of Joes hangin' out in a local garage, spitting out layers of fuzz, buzz, howl and growl. NTJ play straight-ahead rock n' roll, like the Gun Club without the blues or a less frenzied, but equally fierce, Lazy Cowgirls. They do aspire to a certain artiness, however - black and white photographs are included in the Cd booklet alongside the either ambitious or overwrought lyrics (the jury is still out). Well, whatever your opinion of the words, the music speaks for itself. Loudly. And don't miss the godhead "Borax Factory".
Rolling Stone:
Funeral Mountain walks a fine, ferocious line between full-blown hardcore assault and Southern twin-guitar psych-out jam, with some industrial percussion thrown in for good measure. Singer- lyricist Joe Lapsley has quite a way with words: "I fell into the borax factory/Of your love," he wails in "Borax Factory," a saline love song that deserves to become a modern classic, and tunes like "Old South" ("Want to see the rebel flags?/Want to go see 'em?/ They're next to the swastikas in a museum") and the trudge epic "Torsos of Murdered People" (splatter rock with a vengeance) give an indication of his range. For the full impact of his rage, put this one on and turn it up: These guys rock like their lives depended on it.
Los Angeles Reader:
The name may suggest a hippie love-in, but this six-piece Memphis groups' music hits you like a crazed, slogan-chanting activist whose Doc Martens just trampled your bare feet. Ouch. NTJ violates yours space, intentionally. Its disturbing, political punkscapes are populated by the murdered victims of organized crime, homosexually raped inmates, coke dealers, and "Stepford" mall employees, among others. One intriguing element of this CD-only release is the lyrics booklet, which contains incredible black-and-white photography, giving a sophisticated outward sheen to the powerful music inside. The hyperbole of "I Fell Into the Borax Factory of Your Love" and the metaphor of "Don't Get Loud With Me, Bitch" (for governmental bullying) are evidence that creative, albeit twisted, minds are at work. All the way from Memphis? Go figure.
Spin:
Neighborhood Texture Jam set the farm on fire and cooked Vienna sausages on the flames. After several years of beating on trash can tops, breaking glass and throwing chairs across clubs "to incorporate that unique sound," Neighborhood Texture Jam has jelled into a tight, rhythmic, hard rocking unit. Though the textures tend toward the more conventional percussion instruments these days, the group manages an unusual aural attack. Harnessing the energy of early punk bands like Shrapnel and the Pistols, NTJ does not sacrifice rhythm, melody or song. They're pissed off and they're listenable. They take on imperialism ("Don't Get Loud With Me, Bitch"), hang out with bikers ("Bikers") and make fun of suburbia ("You're a special person / You're unique / You're an employee in a mall boutique"). Beautifully packaged with lyrics and complimenting photos, this disc reveals an intelligent band that has studied the past but is looking forward to the future. It's heavy shit.
Philadelphia City Paper:
For a real kick in the head, turn your eyes and ears to Funeral Mountain, the debut recording from Neighborhood Texture Jam. By calling the mid-South environs of Memphis home, the band has been sufficiently insulated from the New York avant-garbage scene to be still capable of making truly disturbing and wild music.
The disc starts off with a lone voice of off-kilter intensity reciting tender words of love: "I fell into the Borax factory of your love/ dragged by mule train out across the alkaline plain to the Borax factory of your love." Simple, eloquent, ugly. A drum roll, and in comes the band. A lumbering rhythm, big, big guitars playing deadly chords, and over-amped vocals. Each instrumental and vocal phrase packs more raw rock energy than can be found on all of Sonic Youth's record. Funeral Mountain is absolutely seething noise that's all the better for its disregard of polite music.
The central element of Neighborhood Texture Jam is vocalist Joe Lapsley, who does not sound like a well man and is therefore the ideal choice to front a band. Guitarists Tee Cloar and Tommy Murphy continually lay up a thick cloud of string sound, ripping out chords and noisy solos with brutal abandon. Under them is a rhythm section that does nothing more than build a massive foundation. Add in some banging on metal and other objects and you've got everything you need to have a real time.
Just give a listen to "Bikers" for proof of this band's crunch quotient. This soon-to-be-classic ditty is as powerful as Motorhead in full flight but with an even more demented edge.
This record is not shocking for shock value alone - it just reflects the life we happily live each and every day. By the time "Torsos of Murdered People" closes out the disc, you're ready for a return visit with the prison cellmates, the Khmer Rouge, the bikers, the drug dealers, and other assorted characters who inhabit Funeral Mountain.
By the way, Feralette Records should be congratulated for the packaging of this release - it's almost as much fun to look at as it is to listen to.
Pop Culture Press:
Through sewers and swamps, biker hang-outs and Death Valley, Joe Lapsley takes us on an intense and disturbing journey into the most sordid and seemy parts of America. With their debut release, Funeral Mountain, on the Nashville label Feralette, Neighborhood Texture Jam has already transcended the genre- stereotypes of Memphis bands and marked themselves as one of the most exciting new bands in the country. The sound is hard- edged to say the least, combining the energy of 70's punk with the sheer volume of contemporary white noise/metal bands.
Producer Price Harrison has done an excellent job of adding variety to the music from song to song, though Lapsley's vocals may vary too much, sounding at times like other more familiar singers. But the intelligence and insight of the lyrics are what sets NTJ apart. For example Lapsley has written the most apt, if not eloquent, song about the New Jersey Turnpike in "The Environmental Song," better known as "Hydraulic Buttfuck." Bleaker and less overtly sarcastic, the song is still reminiscent of the Dead Kennedy's "Holiday In Cambodia."
Of course, some people will view Funeral Mountain as obscene. If it gets the national attention it deserves, it will probably make it to the top of the PMRC charts. But what can the word "Buttfuck" compare to the true obscenity of the refinery-lined Turnpike? In fact the album contains relatively few four-letter words, compared to your average Hollywood "buddy movie," but the subjects of most of the songs are, well, not nice. But prison rape and organized crime won't go away because we refuse to face them. Far from applauding the themes of his songs, Lapsley paints his pictures with a detached, almost amoral eye. In "Looking For Heroin" "four white dudes" go from looking for cool kicks to being people who "can't feel loved/long sleeves instead/ that is because/ their souls are dead." As testament to the strength of the songs, the CD booklet (the album is only available on CD as of now) can almost be considered as a small volume of poetry. Not just that the lyrics can stand alone, but each song is printed - legibly - on a page accompanied by some nice photography. (But as is the case with all lyrics sheets, a discrepancy occurs; in this case with the omission of my favorite line "Organized crime has taken a bite out of them" from "Torsos of Murdered People").
All the songs on the album are about something, though sometimes some quite horrible things; absent is any cool, downtown NYC posturing. Even a song tht started as the line "I fell into the Borax factory of your love" turns into an emotional account of the rigors of 19th century borax mining. In "Don't Get Loud With Me, Bitch" complete with goofy Japanesey backing vocals, aggressive political powers (the Khmer Rouge, the USSR, and the USA) come off as nothing more than macho dumbasses pushing around weaker girlfriends.
The mark of any well-assembled album is that it ends on a high note. Harrison has certainly done that here. The album ends with the incessantly pounding riff, textured by the sounds of breaking glass, of "Torsos of Murdered People," a song to be listened to in the dark, late at night, very drunk, and very loud.
The Metro:
One of the most frustrating things about regularly reviewing new releases and bands is that it rapidly becomes apparent that most of what you're hearing has already been done before for better or (usually) worse, so finding a band with a unique sound and approach that's good to boot is always a delight. Memphis' Neighborhood Texture Jam are one such outfit that most definitely deserve to be taken note of. On Funeral Mountain, NTJ harnesses twin electric guitars, ultra- heavy bass, pounding drums and what they call "texture" (percussion employing trash cans, pieces of metal, broken glass and other "found" objects) to unleash a hard-edged, rough-hewn aural assault. Over the band's grinding, singer Joe Lapsley shrieks, howls and generally pushes everything over the edge as he leads us on a visceral excursion through late 20th Century America. From the opening blast of "Borax Factory", one of the strangest love songs ever penned ("I fell into the Borax factory/of your love"), to the chilling closer "Torsos of Murdered People", this is a wild, fast-paced ride that never lets up. Highly recommended.
Vanderbilt Hustler:
NEIGHBORHOOD KNOWS HOW TO KICK OUT THE JAMS: If Neighborhood Texture Jam's debut album is any indication of what might be brewing over in Memphis, then Athens just might need to step down as Kingdom of the New South.
Formed in 1984, disbanded in 1985 and reformed in 1988, Neighborhood Texture Jam has experienced a few setbacks, but their newest release, Funeral Mountain, gives the New South music scene a swift, steel-toed kick in the pants. With abrasively wonderful texture, NTJ kicks out the jams like no other Southern band.
Neighborhood Texture Jam arrived on the music scene in 1984. Prior to the break-up, they were thrown out of the Pub at Rhodes College and told never to return to Memphis' historic Beale Street. What seemed like an intriguing start turned out to be a quick ending. After a show at the Antenna Club, the band broke up.
In 1988, they reunited after being reawakened to their unique sound by a friend. Since then, the band has recorded their debut album on Nashville's Feralette Records.
Funeral Mountain begins with "Borax Factory," a roaring, soaring statement that sets the mood for the entire album. The disposition of singer Joe Lapsley is menacing. With a chorus that wallows in Dinosaur Jr. fuzz, Lapsley's full-force voice is aggressively inspirational.
As the guitars of Tee Cloar and Tom Murphy grind incessantly, the band is hardly just another mindless bunch of whiny musicians. In "Running From Miami" and "Looking for Heroin," they seem to understand both sides of the drug culture.
In "Looking for Heroin," Joe Lapsley sings "Four white dudes in a Plymouth uptown/Looking for heroin." NTJ creates images of searching for drugs while "blue collar dads don't have a clue/just what their boys are really up to."
The lyrics seem almost satirical as Lapsley describes the adolescent search for satisfaction. However, the band has grasped this and many other aspects of modern society and has served up a dose of dark realism.
Rocking with an oceanic groove, "Running From Miami" is a look at the drug dealers and their empires. "We're the biggest blow dealers all around." As the title might suggest, "Don't Get Loud With Me, Bitch" contains a chorus suitable for sampling on the next N.W.A. album. The song is dynamic. Everything from light, clear grooves to heavy riffing is thrown in, complete with Moe, Larry and Curly on backing vocals.
It is hard to figure out when the band is joking as in "Bikers." The song describes America's cycle riding bandits with as much insight and wit as Hunter S. Thompson's Hells Angels. The lyrics are vividly vulgar and completely entrancing.
For a dose of Lou Reed realism and pounding grooves, Neighborhood Texture Jam is a fine addition to the New South music scene. Give the guys a gig at Graceland and watch the King rise again.
Copper Canyon
Where the gristle meets the grit (it's a fountain of wit)
This is the baddest (where bad means that far too rare combination of hard and heavy rock and intelligent lyrics) rock music I've ever come across in my many years of obsessively listening to the stuff. Intelligent rock?!! Huh? and I don't mean silly stuff like those overblown prog art rock acts of the seventies that might titillate the mind of a 15 year old. (Let's all be thankful that they haven't started putting Jon Anderson lyrics on tins of tea ...did he ever sing about "celestial seasons"? But getting down to it..."Funeral Mountain" kicks off with the lead singer (unbacked) warbling
"I fell into the Borax factory of your love
dragged by a muletrain across the alkaline plane
to the Borax factory of your love..."
then the band rumbles in and you get the first taste of the "texture" in Neighborhood Texture Jam which sounds like someone dragging heavy chains and the like across the floor.
Next up is "Enviornmental Song" a bit more hectic paced than the previous track (which I think is called "Borax Factory") this one is reflections on a jackknifed semi causing gridlock on the New Jersey Turnpike --
Then comes "Mall Boutique" a jaunty little number chronicling the downwardly mobile situation of person who works in a mall. Here we meet the bands great sardonic sense of humor head on...
"You're a special person; you're unique
you're an employee in a mall boutique
mall boutique.
You're part of the Exodus--The Great White Flight
A convenience man with a sunlamp tan
A convenience man.......WITH A SUNLAMP TAN!!!!"
and here we hear the wondrous gutteral vocal stylings of the singer (I don't know any of these guys' names) this guy sounds like Lee Ving meets Killdozer--
Next track--I'm not sure of the exact order but I think it's "Don't Get Loud with Me...!" a funked-up geopolitical rant about several scenes of militaristic domination from Pol Pot in Kampuchea to the Soviets crushing of the Czech revolution to the US backed coup in which Pinochet ousted the democratically elected president...
"In the long run you'll thank ITT;
it's better than being an island in a red sea."
Then somewhere around here comes "The Big Johnson" a li'l ditty about a white collar criminal being locked up with...well you get the drift. The singer hurls himself into this track with such abandon twisting and stretching himself to capture the anguish to such an extent that at the end of it you can hear the other members ask him if he's okay. In this age of pension stealing and cruel mergers and outsourcing it's nice to play this track to get a vicarious sense of some justice.
Next up--"Old South"-- a short rocker which cuts the old south down to size (and these boys are from Tennessee so they know just what in the heck they're talking about)
"Moments of rebellion Jackson and Lee Old South.
But the only real issue was slavery ah the Old South.
It's time to let go..."
Then comes "Bikers" a very hard rocking track which starts out with a guitar sounding like a Harley winding out. Here's a great example of their gritty wit depicting biker games
"They're all lined up to unload some..... ,
the last remnants of feudalism"
Then "Runnning from Miami" about the Cubans who DEAL out of Miami
"We live at the Hilton at the top in a suite.
We grind people into hamburger meat."
Followed by "Looking for Heroin" the guitar work on this one really stands out. I haven't said anything about the musicians so far but the guitar player can hold his own with just about anyone--picture if Neil Young played for Motorhead --something like that and the band is really good at dropping out so he can shine by himself for a few seconds.
"Four white dudes in the day they pour cement
Now they're in Harlem looking for a tenement"
Finally the last track the granddaddy of them all in my opinion- "Torsos of Murdered People" What can you say about this one? It's slow it's very direct it even gets darn near microscopic at times and we hear more "texture on this one than on any other
"They're arms are missing hacked off both of 'em
but we know the sex of one of 'em
from the empty tattered ....."
So anyway I'm poor and I would really like to have a copy of this CD but I couldn't afford it. I have a tape that I've worn completely out. Now "I've got a used CD but I need to have the art too. So if anyone can cut me a good deal --I've got our my own music to trade--"How does 40 lbs of Spayed and Neutered Catflesh" sound? I'll give you your very own copy--you can be the first on your block.