Herb Diamante & Friends - A Spoonful of Yeast

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Customer reviews
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4...according to our Brett on Wed 06 Oct, 2010.

This is some seriously oddball shit. Imagine the album that'd result if bands like Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sun City Girls, Dialing In and Climax Golden Twins all got together to form backing bands for a Scott Walker-esque torch singer who peddles an even more nightmarish instability than the recent work of the Scottster himself. Then kick the worn-out shoes off your hardworking imaginings, for such a thing exists! It kicks off with 'Mr. Lonely', apparently originally intended for the Harmony Korine film, a (relatively) straight-laced croonathon which creates some sort of a false sense of security before the real weirdness begins, a whistlestop tour of peculiar experimental styles. It's not gonna be for everyone, and I'm not sure the good people of Latvia will be too impressed with the lyrics to 'Riga', but it's certainly something out of the ordinary..

Herb Diamante, occasional member of Leeds’ seminal Vibracathedral Orchestra and the underground’s favourite lysergically-altered chanteur, comes on like the locked-away offspring of Scott Walker and Marc Almond throughout this album. And, like the chemically altered lounge lizard that he is, on each track on A Spoonful Of Yeast, he’s able to summon the artistry of a host of fantasy house bands to back his deranged suaveness.

First off we have Seattle’s legendary Sun City Girls – the band that become ever more revered as time passes, even though they’ve been defunct since drummer Charles Gocher died in 2007. Mr Lonely was intended for the Harmony Korine film of the same name and was recorded by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth) – its an aching, almost humorously self-pitying ballad originally made massive by Bobby Vinton, and with the help of the Girls, plus Eyvind Kang and Jessica Kenney, Herb also delivers the song to grandiosity in his own wonderfully skewed way. For all its weirdness, it’s really quite a moving appeal, exacerbated by the expertly understated strings and backing vocals.

From this grandstanding beginning, Herb then guides us through a drunken crawl of all that’s good about unhinged and underground rock these days. The line-up of collaborators he assembles is the free rock festival of your dreams. In addition to the legendary SCG, we also have Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Dialing In, At Jennie Richie and the Caroliner-affiliated Diatric Puds.

A Spoonful Of Yeast swings (in many senses) between the nightmarishly paranoiac (the tracks with Dialing In and At Jennie Richie especially), the insistently uneasy gait of the Sunburned track, 808 bossa balladry with Diatric Puds, and swirling eastern-tinged mushroom mantra in the company of the ever great Vibracathedral Orchestra.

The word ‘Lynchian’ has been used by several preview listeners to describe this album, and coincidentally Bobby Vinton did also write the song Blue Velvet. Herb has certainly travelled from party turn to fully formed concept with aplomb, providing us all with a knowingly humorous take on all things we love and laugh at simultaneously – mostly ourselves, our own pretensions and those moments where we’ve all failed so hilariously to keep our act together. To do that as well as producing a great album with an all-star cast – that’s got to be an achievement, right?

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