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Rascal Reporters — Dux in a Row
(Bandcamp no#, 2023, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2023-12-26

Dux in a Row Cover art

Perhaps one of the most idiosyncratic bands to emerge from the Midwest in the 70s, Rascal Reporters is one of those groups that would completely change their stripes from one album to the next — one might not even recognize that two adjacent albums on their timeline are even by the same band, which is a good thing I guess, keeps you guessing. For most of their years together they were a duo of Steve Gore and Steve Kretzmer (both multi-instrumentalists) with guests joining in, playing some of the most ridiculously complex music imaginable, comparable only to 60s Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, and possibly Gentle Giant. Sadly, Steve Gore passed away back in 2009, leaving Kretzmer to determine the group’s future. In 2017 the group was revived when Kretzmer teamed up with Irish multi-instrumentalist James Strain, who quickly got busy sorting through the group’s unreleased early archives. Earlier in 2023 Cuneiform released their newest offering digitally: The Strainge Case of Steve, which is the first new music created by Kretzmer and Strain, which we reviewed in these pages back in July. Disc one of this two disc set is in fact The Strainge Case of Steve, finally available on compact disc. The second disc consists of material that was originally recorded by Kretzmer and Gore back in the band’s formative days, revisited by Strain between 2017 and 2021 at which time new parts were added to the original recordings, and were released at that time as Redux Vol.1 (2019) and Redux, Vol. 2: Rascals Revenge and the Great Reset (2021). Eleven of the thirteen tracks on those Redux releases have been remastered in 2023 and released as Dux in a Row, or disc two of this set. One has to conclude that the music that the Original Rascal Reporters left on the cutting room floor back in their early days is every bit as brilliant as what they released at the time. Short little snippet tracks like “Improv Cost Me My Job” join sprawling complex opuses like “Hubert Greenery Peck,” “Egg Soup” and “Cashew Medley,” each of which break the ten minute mark, and “Moments” that’s right behind them at nine. Most of the cuts are primarily instrumentals of keyboards and drums, sometimes with a bit of bass and guitar added to the mix. A track like “One of Our Dogs Is Missing” is an ever churning complex mashup that never wastes any time with repetition. Vocals, where they exist, are rarely sung (as on “Fallen Mind” for example), but more often spoken Zappa-esque fragments. “My Three Sounds” is a take-off on the theme from the early 60s TV Show My Three Sons; wometimes the pieces are absolutely bizarre, like “Egos Explode” — a listener will never know where it’s going to go next. Dux in a Row is an amazing collection of early reworked outtakes and artifacts from RR’s history.

Filed under: Archives, 2023 releases

Related artist(s): Rascal Reporters

More info
http://amarxe.bandcamp.com/album/dux-in-a-row

 

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