Sutt’s Letters – First Collection

There I was, minding my own business, when I was hit head-on by a motorized rickshaw clean into neon meat dream. While there, I was fed a variety of exotic luxuries on dinner plates, each course flowing parallel to final digestion but existing separately as a holistic delight. I was told to internalize every microbyte, and bring the experience back home to share with everyone. Then a raw mist and I woke up in the infirmary with blunt amnesia blanket. All I saw was grey. After a while I’d surmised I was wrapped in invisible man bandages, but for a while there, I had woken from comatose state into a dis-associative limbo, All senses kicked into speed freaking autopilot. Out of this shock state, I began to hear it. Before long it took over every sense. I felt it in my entire being. The message that was meant to be delivered, placed unto me with prophetic ease. I didn’t have to climb a mountain or nothing. It comes in the form of music, and it’s one-of-a-kind in the sense of every solar chasm in this goddamned continuum. This is one of those once in a lifetime albums that puts you into an altruistic direction of previously untapped thoughts. It comes to you at no time in particular, as it exists in no time in particular. It is outside of all that. May it carry great mystery forever and ever. This is Sutt’s Letters’ First Collection.

What I think I know about Sutt’s Letters’ First Collection:

It was recorded after the band made it to the finals in some Japanese music competition called “Shinko Riot” in 2009. Immediately after the competition, the band dissipated. The album saw a resurgence when reissued in Japan in 2015. It was only available in Japan until a couple months ago when it found its way to America, and it is now available digitally worldwide. There is no coherent live footage available of them whatsoever, just little snippets dubbed with studio sound. I don’t even know what the fuck Sutt’s Letters is, or if it’s valid translation at all. The research for this album was done through cloudy antennae that leaves every third syllable out of transmission. It’s all sudoku from here on out. Speculation is what we’re really left with in this world of Sutt’s Letters, but none of the history matters anyway. It’s about what’s in front of you. Dig it?

Dig this:

This is the first American Review of Sutt’s Letters’ First Collection. What have I gotten myself into? I gotta conduct this in just the right way so we don’t end up underwater! (Heavy shit going on here at S&S. One toke over the line and SWEET MARY! I’m making shadow puppets in a padded room for the rest of my days.) OK here we go. Alright, so, this album is going to inspire a lot of people, and in a couple generations it will be held as a classic. Hear the classic before it were! Finally win this neverending facade of cultural oneupsmanship with your friends and loved ones! At last, you’ll be able to stick it to your aunt who went on a mission trip to Uganda when she was 20! You buying this racket? Good! Neither was we! On with it!

いち (ichi)

に (ni)

さん (san)

“We were born in 1990/ Yeah we’re the hottest one in the world/ Don’t miss it don’t miss it/ Just check it out now.”

This is the only piece of English on First Collection and, pardon my patriotism, it sums up the album beautifully. Everything is accidental flailing genius from start to finish. From double-dutch ghetto-blast curb stompers (think Beastie Boys if they had calculus degrees at Princeton) to primitive Latin proto-garage (Los Saicos, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Question Mark and the Mysterians), taken through the eye of the Orient and set out to unknown abyss. The whopping blows latter delivered are contrasted with butterfly odysseys that breach the barrier between music and extraterrestrial communication.

The instrumentation is absolute mathematics. Nothing is done without the four-fold intention of doing so on First Collection. The perfection is abundantly clear to even the stone age layman. Though some of the speedy poly-funk holy grail shit they’re riding on here is damn hard to keep up with, there’s no doubt of the talent presented. The production is exactly ten years ahead of its time. I say ten years instead of “a decade” so you can really understand the magnitude of what I’m saying. I was nine when this was made. They are doing things on this album that weren’t being done until just recent, with a mix that effortlessly shifts from ’60s pop to modern mainstream psychedelia, going from George Henry Martin (The 5th Beatle) to Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) by the track.

What turns me onto this number so hard is its overall sense of punk philosophies. It’s in the attitude and the approach taken to each endeavor. What do these endeavors turn out as? A perfect garage album, in a spoken language that I can’t understand. I only can’t understand the language in the present idea. On a platonic level, the noble truth shines through the opening of my consciousness, it bonds in a symbiotic sac, in it I understand. The emotion and humanity touches my nerves and conveys exactly what it wants to me. From love, to lust, to exploration; and so on. All without a common word. Who needs talk? Talk is cheap. I received the word with ethereal eloquence.

These are truly the sounds of the world: a hairy place. They can go from calculated, technique-driven dive bombs into utter free association on a given track. Though it is important to note that even the improvisation has structure to it, because the logistics are so strong they flood into the subconscious mind at work. It resembles the likes of Television and the Dead, where air chirps and waves over the sonic journey in the mid-center, carrying the song to a crescendo of tidal clapping proportions that wipe your memory clean out in perfect devastation. It ends with your ears cooked in and you can smell the burnt brain tissue (hear it too). There’s even a contrast within the jam sphere itself. They have the heady, elongated star banners and the tight character expositions that showcase physical ability as opposed to mental. I’m talking songs with blaring blues harp and Ron Wilson (The Surfaris) drumming out of left field! It’s a gas! It fades out then comes back in loud as ever, and you’d think your thoughts are what brought it back in the first place.

Whew, It looks like we’re getting to the end here. I hope the world affairs stay in order after this, tectonic plates and such. Even so, I’ve gotten all I wanted at this juncture, you’d be wise to get yours too. Listen out for it, it’s coming dear. I got mine one sunny day, without any warning. A fat anomaly if I can speak to the subject. After all the analytics, it’s still that way; more so. An album out of thin fucking air. Came from mirrored sky blue slit to fry eggs in my brain. Perfect in every solitary way. Impeccably so. Eerily so. Gee, it makes me wonder if this whole thing is even real? Maybe it’s a great white lie. Just a closer walk with thee, and I could see an eventual end, starve on command, breath air-free; last choke up, pity. Somewhere, a mind-numbing supercomputer channels the atmosphere into Sutt’s Letters’ First Collection, substituting the human condition for the powers of the sun. A sick ruse, designed to keep me sedated, stuck in morbid naiveté. Damned for eternity.

Maybe I died in that rickshaw run-up.

But I’ll save that headache for who needs it. I guess all I really wanna say is,

does it matter anyway?

終了(owari)

Sutt’s Letters
First Collection
[Redrec/Sputniklab]