If I can’t convince the guy from Supreme Dicks who comes into the store to get on the ball and reissue these albums, I guess I just have to share them with the world and pray that you people create a greater demand for them. So, get to it!
Not quite avant-garde, not quite ambient, not quite psychedelic, The Emotional Plague was the last proper studio album recorded by Supreme Dicks. It’s fucking phenomenal. There are not many traditional sounds to be heard here. Instead, the band focuses on timbre and a nuanced amalgam of sounds. This album plays out like a Jackson Pollock painting. Starting with the ungodly cool drone piece “Synaesthesia,” the Dicks waste no time making their intentions known. Abandon hope, all you who enter here in search of melody. The Unexamined Life might have been a fucked up folk album, but it was still a folk album, with weird lyrics and melodies. This is something entire different. Something beyond normal. This is a skeleton of an album. As patient and as minimal as can be. And it’s a home run.
“The Emotional Plague has the unique ability to draw a listener happily through some of the most indirect and seemingly unfocused constructions of the Dicks’ recorded work — even the record’s most rambling and apparently directionless moments have the quirky twang and casual beauty of the Silver Jews’ best work, or Yo La Tengo’s homespun Fakebook. The key seems to be an underlying organization that’s carefully disguised in the Dicks’ folky drawl — beneath all of the sprawling quirkiness of The Emotional Plague, there are simply gorgeous tunes like “Cuchulain,” and the oddity of the band’s presentation sets them off perfectly. Strangely enough, this distinction renders The Emotional Plague as one of the Dicks’ most accessible (if least immediate) albums — rather than the vaguely eerie psychedlic folk which characterized The Unexamined Life, the record’s emphasis is on sparkling, rustic constructions which add a necessary emotional element to the band’s sonic idiosyncracies.” – All Music Guide
Supreme Dicks
The Emotional Plague
Homestead Records, 1996
MediaFire DL Link
01. Synaesthesia
02. CuChulain (Blackbirds Loom)
03. Columnated Ruins / Seeing Distant Chimneys
04. Along A Bearded Glade
05. Swell Song
06. Showered
07. A Donkey’s Burial In A Tower On A Mirage
08. Adoration De l’Agneau Mystique
09. Porridge For The Clydonian Boar
10. Siberian Penal Colony (Ode To Joel Stanley)
11. Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)
