A former rallying point for "fair use" thanks to a
legendary row involving U2, Casey Kasem, and a little dog named Snuggles,
Negativland has lately had its copyright-terrorism thunder stolen by
crate-robbing DJs like Girl Talk, not to mention the many other culture-jamming
cut-ups it's influenced. Perhaps that's why the group's new Thigmotactic, a primarily solo effort
from collective leader Mark Hosler, adopts the iffy "conventional is now
subversive" philosophy by offering its first-ever album of genuine songs.
Hosler has dabbled in balladry before—mostly in pseudo-jingles like "Nesbitt's
Lime Soda Song," "Drink It Up," and "The Greatest Taste Around"—but it's
still a bold move, considering that fans of Negativland's signature collage of
context-free sound bites probably weren't clamoring for an entire record of
musical interludes. And to his credit, Hosler is an imaginative arranger: Thigmotactic's schizophrenic blend of
nitrous-oxide psychedelia, glitchy electronica, and bent indie falls somewhere
between Yerself Is Steam-era Mercury Rev and The Halo Benders, providing an
appropriately quirky background for his stream-of-consciousness lyrics about
waffles, cows, and Herb Alpert. But nothing grates faster than quirk, and while
the album's best moments still come from misappropriation—punctuating the
lead-off track "Richard Nixon Is Dead" with Tricky Dick's exhortations of "poppycock";
dropping in a talk-radio squabble on "It's Not A Critique"—the
substitution of preciousness for prankishness is destined to disappoint
diehards and confuse newcomers.