Severed Heads - Cuisine (With Piscatorial)

Tom Ellard has never had much patience for reverence, least of all toward his own medium. "The whole food joke is really about what music's about and how disposable it is," he said of this record. "People have records like they have cups of coffee." Cuisine (With Piscatorial) was Severed Heads' ninth album, released in 1991 on Volition and Nettwerk, and thirty-five years later it is finally reaching vinyl for the first time.

The Cuisine half is the group at their most immediate: compact, bright, roughly three minutes a piece. "Pilot In Hell," "Seven Of Oceans," "King Of The Sea" and "Ugly Twenties" skewer synth-pop convention while writing better hooks than most of the acts being skewered, and the melancholy keeps leaking in underneath the sequencers. "Twister," the lead single, is the outlier, captured live in Riverdale, California while the rest was assembled at Terse Tapes in Sydney between 1989 and 1991. Ellard produced alongside Stephen Jones.

The Piscatorial half is where Ellard went, in his phrase, fishing for ideas. The "Quest For Oom Pa Pa" suite collages vintage jazz records into an angular nightmare and puts the cut-up instinct that made Severed Heads matter back at the center. The pairing is the whole argument: kitchen electronics and nursery-rhyme melodies on one side, tape-loop chaos on the other, the same restless intelligence driving both.

This expanded double LP marks the album's first vinyl appearance, adding a previously unreleased early version of "Seven Of Oceans" plus a six-page booklet of liner notes, lyrics and press clippings. Dark Entries, DE-350.