This is a free CD I picked up at a Public Space One show. Hubcap Holmes is a solo project of Kurt Austin, one of the loose cohort of early-20s musicians currently making noise in Iowa City. The live performance (with Matt Fenner on bass) showed that Hubcap Holmes has a good grasp of pop songwriting; his songs had sing-along melodies, simple without being too simple. Playing and singing unamplified to an audience in a tight circle around him, it seemed like he was trying to reinvent the 19th Century art of entertaining friends with homemade music.
On Just For Funstuff, Kurt incorporates found sound and multiple layers of guitar, but the rawness and sincerity evident in his live performances remains. It’s not so much produced as assembled via audio bricolage. It’s little like Sebadoh, if you can imagine Sebadoh jamming with Syd Barret. The songs are very short and they tend to fall apart rather than play through to satisfying conclusions.
Dream logic seems to inform this CD more than any intentional artifice, as in “News about shoes,” which layers a clumsily cut loop from “O Tannenbaum” combined with the distorted bellowing of sea lions before making a non-sequitor segue into a kitchen table recording of Kurt singing about shoes. The longest track “Grow flowers (grow sad)” features the addled babbling of Cooper Whittlesey, accompanied by static and droning guitars. It’s definitely silly, but I keep going back to it trying to understand why I keep going back to it.
Just For Funstuff is slapdash, raw, and amateurish on the surface, and maybe in actual fact. But it’s also appealing and affecting music, in ways that are hard to explain–the closest I can come is to say that it’s charmingly opaque.
