If animals in popular song have mostly been used as representatives of gooey, prelapsarian whimsy (The Beatles’ 1968 ballad ‘Blackbird’, say), motivational triumph-over-adversity (Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’, 1982), social alienation (take Wire’s 1981 track ‘I Am the Fly’, with the line ‘I can spread more disease than the fleas’) or simply sexual prowess (vast herds of songs fit this category, but dire Metal band W.A.S.P.’s 1983 single ‘Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)’ pretty much says it all), then with Death Sentence: Panda! the animal kingdom has turned the tables. Take ‘Animals Hate You’, from the San Francisco trio’s 11-minute début mini-album Puppy, Kitty, or Both (2005): ‘Animals hate you / They really do! / ‘Cos you’re dirty! / You made them … maaaaaaad!’ Feeding the cat will never be the same again.
Deriving their name from the punishment in China for hunting pandas, Death Sentence: Panda! – Paul Costuros, Chris Dixon and Kim West – forge a sound that is by turns as cute and as violent as their titular mascot. Blasts of clarinet, saxophone and flute are pitch-shifted, distorted and warped across frenetic stop-start percussion. Anti-humanist lyrics about animals (a champion rabbit is the subject of the song ‘Mr Chip’, and Dixon and West recently adopted a stray rabbit they named Bun Ra) and the natural world are delivered with furious intensity as West switches between girlish whispers and throat-ripping, guttural howls like an ancient shaman finding herself accidentally transported to a 21st-century nightclub. Death Sentence: Panda!’s influences are refreshingly hard to place; one minute they seem to channel a host of Bay Area bands – The Residents by way of the Dead Kennedys, or a brutalized Deerhoof – the next, traditional Korean and Chinese music, and woozy New Orleans marching bands; all wrapped in a cartoonish sense of fun.
Released by peerlessly adventurous promoters and label Upset the Rhythm – a vital force on London’s underground live music scene – Festival of Ghosts / R’out 4,002 marks something of a move forward for Death Sentence: Panda! Essentially two albums grafted together, the Festival of Ghosts half presents a spookier side to their music than the second, R’out 4,002, segment, which was recorded in 2004 and is more in keeping with the signature DayGlo savagery of Puppy, Kitty, or Both. The opening track, ‘Here Come the Ghosts’, fades in with heavily effects-treated percussion, conjuring images of a spectral Shinto or Buddhist procession, followed by blasts of sax and clarinet that sound like the foghorns of distant ships or the call-to-arms of an antediluvian army, as played through hollowed-out elephant tusks and recorded by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. The pace picks up through ‘Public Forest’, ‘Shadow Ghost’, ‘Ooops! Ghost’ and finally the rabbit anthem ‘Mr Chip’, although the mood remains haunted (admittedly, the titles do set listeners along a certain interpretative path) in comparison with the second half. R’out 4,002 immediately destroys the dubby reverie with the full-pelt dementia of tracks such as ‘Slumber Party’ and ‘Tribal Boyfriend’, which with its breathlessly syncopated, bending and growling clarinet (and brief passages of what to me sounds like the cancan) is a psychotically lustful ode to a feral object of desire.
‘I know the animals are laughing at us,’ sang Talking Heads in their 1979 track ‘Animals’. Death Sentence: Panda! are the translators of that wild laughter.
Dan Fox
