Demos

H.C. Turk - Glory Roar

Owain Paciuszko 10/05/2009

Rating: 2/5

Florida's H.C. Turk is a writer, visual artist and musician and this is his debut album. It opens sparsely with a vocoder-tweaked vocal over Oriental sounding synths, falling somewhere between Vangelis and an obscure late-70s Bowie b-side. This oblique instrumentation continues across the record, recalling later Roxy Music tracks and, at certain instances, Trevor Jones's score to the cult film Labyrinth. The shadow that really falls over the record though is from the more experimental, electronic music of the 1980s, but pitched against Turk's samey vocals a lot of the differences in the arrangment become blurry.

I Eat Puppies however starts off promisingly with sampled dog noises and a big synth drum, but it quickly tumbles backwards into the patterns and progressions that you've already heard before on the record. Meanwhile You Think It's A Dance has a very bizarre, spoken-word refrain and glitchy drumming. Turk has clearly refined his 80s-synth sound, though when the vocals come in it all ends up very similar. As an instrumental record this may have worked well, but the lyrics and voice just become a barrier to enjoyment; though the inclusion of a self-cursing outtake track is rather interesting and occasionally terrifying.