On: Greg Oblivian and the Tip-Tops — Head Shop
This here is a treat of little known brilliance, member of the flagship Memphis garage punk band Oblivians, Greg Cartwright (aka Greg Oblivian) casts off his primordial and raucous shackles for an exercise in intimacy. This was released during the Oblivians hiatus, and although Greg covered a lot of ground with Reigning Sound and Compulsive Gamblers, this shines a light on a different area of his songcraft. It’s also closed out by one completely batshit 17 minute suite tacked on to the end of it — which I happen to like.
An aspect which always embodied the appeal of Oblivians to me was the fact that everything was lo-fi, it sounded shitty and raw, and when I first heard these tracks it struck me how delicately the lo-fi brush had been applied here. The songs even take on a kind of R. Stevie Moore cassette-hiss washed quality. They sound like artefacts from the past, and there is an inseparable bittersweet undercurrent of nostalgia coursing through this record, say, if old polaroid pictures could sing. It is completely apparent that Greg is playing around with different genres, referencing different eras, and in this territory we find exciting results.
We kick off with Watching My Baby Get Ready where we jump straight into the good stuff with a horn-driven pop rock track, Greg’s voice baying to lend it a certain affected, soul baring element, folk and country become clear points of reference across the first side, Precious One revives an angelic psychedelic folk sound reminiscent of George Harrison at his most revealing. The exploration of a variety of sounds carries extremely well, as Greg hops from one musical landscape to another and adapts to the new surroundings like a chameleon.
Taking from doo-wop, a form of music which has served as an inspiration for Greg before, Beside You — is a cover of The Swallows, which sounds appropriately classic and Earth Angel enough to suit a 50’s high school prom scene for a movie that was never made. “Twice as Deep” is a melancholy folk rock completely indebted to the beautiful organ wailing throughout. Bad Man or, this version of Bad Man as opposed to the stomping Oblivians version is a twinkling acoustic number which sees Greg’s voice take on an entirely different role to the wild Memphis cowboy shriek in his garage records. Probably the best track on this album too. I believe his wife played the magnificent twinkling xylophone which follows Greg’s rising croon.
Speaking of shrieking, that’s exactly what happens on the last track, and much of it. Greg runs through a stream-of-consciousness style rottweiller barking and totally loses it (live) over a clearly broken or maltreated drum machine and unkempt lo-fi riffs, firing off about record labels, scenes, worrying immediate threats of physical violence and other unintelligible shit (for 17 minutes did I mention that?) which he is clearly animated about but which I’m not sure I will ever fully understand because he’s howling like a rabid animal, and this is far too off-the-cuff for any kind of lyric sheet. Still it exemplifies raw, unapologetic punk energy through and through, and it obviously worked as the likely inebriated spectator bellowing a salutory “fuck yeah!” can be heard at the very end of the final track.
Self-Indulgent Asshole? Yeah — most of my favourite rockstars are exactly that. Schizophrenic rock albums are the best.
