Reviews

Eddie the Rat
Live at Artists Television Access
Friday 3/16 9pm

The primary expectation of most show goers is to be entertained. For performers it is to gain notoriety by entertaining. And if they dress to match the music, so much the better. Everyone knows what's going on and everyone's happy. But Eddie the Rat is not here to shine you on. They're here to give you a taste of your own medicine.

Even before the band entered, ATA's tiny stage was cluttered with riddles: a silver buffet tray, a blue wigged boa clad mannequin, and an epmty postcard rack. All this before one player inserted and lit a sparkler in his bra while tuning his guitar. Before long, eleven oddball characters filled the stage and wailed amidst a forest of microphones. By the time Igoresque conductor Pete Martin dragged a bow across the postcard stand (riddle solved?), the audience was both tortured and enthralled. But the terminally uncomfortable fled early on. The rest of us stayed to experience this audio inkblot, and even beg two encores at show's end. Pete Martin, who began solo about a year and a half ago on his synthesizer, uses "inkblot" to describe the rythmic and tonal idea they want to accomplish mixed with the personalities present. Though it is part pandemonium, both the performers and audience stay within a rough pasture of crescendos and decrescendos, starts and stops. Beyond this rough fence, where one goes is up to them. Fragmentation results. No character communicates more than another, and while this conceptually matches the inklblot idea, stage presentations loose power without a focal point. Performers waffled in intensity as well, their presence seeming to fall completely offstage at times. Stronger characters and more physical organization would give the audience a clearer sense of direction. But the question would then be, to what end? Besides, the audience loved it. It's a spiritual junkyard that is much greater than the sum of it's parts.

Eddie the Rat is not just a band; it is an idea.

Working around a series of musical ideas and movement created by Pete Martin, the players (Twelve? Forty? It's hard to tell at times...) pick up their leader's ideas, make them their own, and mesh these new thoughts in with those of their audience. The results are precisely what you would expect: a collection of sounds that run the gamut from full-on skronkery to the completely sublime. Indeed, the whole is more potent than the individual cuts, leaving the listener with an album that I simply dare them to drive alone with after two A.M.

http://www.fakejazz.com/reviews/2003/eddietherat.shtml

Eddie the Rat is a 12(?) or so piece that go about nicely meshing peformance art with incredible orchestration. Cello and Violin accompanies the electric guitar and jazzy drumming as well, with strange electronic effects and a chorus of femenine back up singers. The vocals are bizarre and poetic, many of the songs revolving round the moon, technology and human's relationship with nature. Some of the songs are pretty, others like "Spiritual Amnesia" are rather quirky with the addition of a mouth harp. It's a really enjoyable listen. - Sincere Brutality

Comprised of twelve or so members, Eddie The Rat is something of an orchestra, with members playing everything from the cello and the violin to a mouth harp. This album documents a live performance by the ensemble at the "Artist's Television Access."

Though definitely not for everyone, Eddie The Rat's style is a surprisingly accessible one. Tracks like "Food For the Moon Too Soon Pt. 1" and "I Ovulate In Mode" have definite melodies - the second, in fact, boasts a moody female vocal bit that really has a smooth feeling to it. "Life (As A Prosthetic Workaround For The Soul)," meanwhile, is a strong track with an eerie melody that's intertwined with all sorts of little soundclips and noises.

Altogether, Eddie The Rat's Food For The Moon Too Soon is a fantastic live release that really shows off the band's inventive style. Sometimes outrageous, sometimes creepy, but always enjoyable, the band have a fresh style that's really worth checking out.

http://www.indieville.com/reviews/eddietherat.htm

Something of an abstract adventure into the spiritual subconscious. Eddie the Rat is a collective of people who play all sorts of instruments and make all manner of rackets. Calling this music abstract is probably accurate, but that doesn't really paint the full picture.

Part of the reason is that Eddie the Rat often uses a coherent line (generally in the bass, but sometimes guitar or percussion or something else) to hold the pieces together. Another reason is that the music is, itself, utterly compelling and instructive.

There are vocals, and sometimes they get in the way of really allowing the ideas to evolve completely. There's a beat sensibility to what lyrics exist (they really crop up on only a couple of songs), and that doesn't excite me. I'd rather hear the music explain what the lyrics can only hint at.

No matter. This journey of spiritual exploration is as breathtaking and exciting as any I've taken in some time. Eddie the Rat is constantly surprising and engaging. The musical avant-garde never sounded so appealing.

reviewed in issue #234, October 2002

http://www.cent.com/abetting/archE.html#EDDIE

This live recording is a shifting amalgam of avant-garde noise and secular choir music. Eddie The Rat is, in a sense, the bastard child of a well intentioned vocal group and ear-splitting garage rock. It's almost punk. There are moments when the squeaking of chairs in the audience can be confused with the cacophony on stage. Shocking, really. The clarity of the ensemble's focus is evident on the more excited moments of tracks like "Waiting For (Ain't Never Gonna Get) Enlightenment Blues", and the cool quotient wanders up a few notches during passages with monotonal spoken word monologues separated within the stereo field a la The Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery".

Moments of orgiastic intensity and Situationist experiments...

http://www.splendidezine.com/review.html?reviewid=3244635096109611

I can safely describe the music on Food for the Moon Too Soon as an amalgamation of sounds, both musical and "non-musical" (i.e. talking, seemingly random noises, sirens, etc.) -- all of which is organized in cut 'n paste musical arrangements. The problem with this explanation is that it really doesn't tell you, dear reader, what the music sounds like. Eddie the Rat is sure to appeal to people who enjoy all things avant garde ("number nine, number nine" -- need I say more?) My only disappointment with this live performance, is that I'm sure it's more interesting in person.

http://www.scorebaby.com/el-archive-eg.html

An open letter to Eddie The Rat

"Hey there Rat man, how you doin' out there in California? How them orange groves lookin' now? How 'bout the ocean? Look now guys I'm real sorry it's taken me so long to get round to reviewing your disc. Like, I've been so wasted recently, y'know what I'm sayin'? Well, your stuff is far out man, like real groovy, and it sure made me wish I could come to live in California too. You know, my girlfriend's cousin lives right outside San Jose in a log cabin out there in the redwoods man, and her brother and his family work an organic farm, and they're all real cool about it, they're all real nice people. Seems like a great idea to me man, like all I ever do is work in the city and it just makes me sick, and it makes my girlfriend sick too, and that's such a shame, because she truly is a beautiful person. My girlfriend's cousin come over to England one time and she saw me coming back from work wearing my suit and just stood there laughing at me. And she was right, you know what I mean? Your record kinda reminds me of Steve Hillage's Fish Rising LP, and that's a record I really rate, because it's just so neat. You guys, anybody who's prepared to run a lyric like "I got an itch that I gotta scratch. I got an egg that's ready to hatch. I'm sending up a signal that's long overdue, to the Cosmic Bellhop who's got a room with a view" is OK by me. You keep on doin' it. Can I tell my joke now? OK. This hippy goes into a café in California and says to the girl there: "Hey hi. I'll have a beer and a cake". The girl says - "Oh man, don't you know, all the cakes are gone!". The hippy thinks about it for a second, then comes back with this great big goofy smile. "Hey girl that's far out. In that case I do believe I'll take two".

Essential listening for beatniks everywhere.

STEWART GOTT - 4 July 2003

http://www.fluxeuropa.com/eddie_the_rat-food.htm

EDDIE THE RAT Food For the Moon Too Soon (Entartete Kunst) cd 9.98
Eddie The Rat is a 12 piece art-rock / choral ensemble from San Francisco, arriving at a sloppy psychedelic ceremonial music and with plenty of post-industrial / Burning Man / San Francisco 'Fringe' overtones and purposefully oblique verbal conundrums and anagrams. This album - recorded live at Artist's Television Access in 2001 - was one of the band's first incarnations. Eddie The Rat has a lot of good ideas that come out of the massive interaction, but occasionally come across as being too calculated in their 'weirdness' as if they want to get a redundant critical response such as, "Eddie The Rat is like Fellini on acid, or Hendrix on acid, or Zappa on acid." Given a little bit of guidance and a sympathetic producer, this band could turn into something as cool as those fucked-up psychedelic projects on ESP like Cro-Magnon or Godz, but they haven't quite gotten there yet.

http://www.aquariusrecords.org/cat/local5.html

COMPOSER'S NOTE: ************[Interestingly enough: this next review is obviously copied from the one above, as is the practice of some reviewers. If the reviewer didn't even take the time to be write the review, how much time do you think he spent listening to it? No small irony in light of his comments.]*******************

Well, Eddie the Rat is a 12-piece art-rock and choral ensemble from San Francisco. The group's specialty is creating a sound that is sloppily psychedelic, eerily ceremonial, and frighteningly post-industrial. As far as the group's latest release goes, Food for the Moon too Soon was recorded live at Artist's Television Access back in March of 2001, and was actually one of the band's first creations. Dubbed as "part musical sculpture, part sound ceremony," this collection of sounds serves as an abstract adventure that wanders and wanders, but never really gets anywhere.

If you glance at the lyric sheet, there is a message struggling to show itself, with lines like "Conformity breeds mass culture / Freeze-dried anorexic plastic double feature / When the canned laughter stops it must mean the creature / Has descended on the carcass like a vulture" just begging for attention. But the majority of the vocals are almost completely unintelligible, due largely to the fact that they are more along the lines of hums and chants than cleanly sung lyrics, and that variations of every word are usually coming from at least five or six people. When the vocals do step forward though, like on the surprisingly understandable "Spiritual Amnesia," you would rather they hadn't, as they beat to death any attempt at making a point. Meanwhile, the bulk of the instrumentation consists of a wide array of percussion, from a standard drum kit to what sounds like garbage can lids being whacked with tree branches. With such an assortment of rhythms, you would expect at least one of them to remain consistent and serve as the glue that holds everything together, but that rarely happens. Instead, you are forced to rely on the throbbing bass or the less frequent guitar line to maintain the only sense of togetherness. In the end, all nine tracks melt together into one overly indulgent journey that struggles to hold your attention.

Food for the Moon too Soon is filled with the potentially good ideas that stem from such a massive interaction of artists, but none of those thoughts fully come to life here. Instead, it often feels as though Eddie the Rat is trying too hard to be obscure, as though the strangeness of the whole thing is actually quite calculated and predictable.

http://www.adequacy.net/reviews/e/eddietherat.shtml

This is not your usual aural experience. Recorded live in March of last year, these nine tracks blend into each other with into one long track of experimental music. It's really a collection of musicians, rather than a band, because at times it seems like each is doing his/her own thing. Which is all part of the idea. For adventurous types only. (AL)

http://www.impactpress.com/articles/junjul02/musicr6702.html