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Buried in the technical specifications printed on the back cover of Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music was a provocative line reading: "No instruments?"
Lou Reed gave himself some creative wiggle-room by putting a question mark at the end of that potentially explosive two-word manifesto, but Memphis, Tennessee-based Vitamin W embraces it without reservation: the back cover of the remade-remodeled-reissued The Love Drug (which originally saw limited release in Austin, Texas in 1999) says "No instruments." Period.
While one might expect an unlistenable experimental horror show from an instrument-free record that features a knowing Metal Machine Music nod on its cover, Vitamin W actually manages to steer well clear of the noise-for-noise's-sake aesthetic on The Love Drug, instead producing a surprisingly accessible collection of sounds and songs from his battery of blasted and reconstructed loops, samples, snippets, fragments, bits and bytes.
An electronic symphony of sorts, The Love Drug features two major movements ("Prog Slaughter" and "Nightmare in the Morrison Hotel"), each subdivided into smaller component elements. "Prog Slaughter" lives up to its name, with four tracks that thresh King Crimson ('80s version)-flavored licks through filters of punk rock noise, college guitar rock, '60s folk and primitive Kraftwerkian electropop, carving the prog out altogether and dropping it on the studio floor, leaving nothing but lean muscle to glisten on its musical meathooks. "Nightmare in the Morrison Hotel" is also pretty much exactly what it says it is: three tracks from the Doors' greatest album, sampled, blown up, and rebuilt from the few pieces that could be scraped off the floor, some of them with bits of wet and matted prog stuck to them. If you like the Residents' Third Reich and Roll, then you're likely to love this piece.
One track on The Love Drug merits particular mention. The beautiful and resonant "Cybercreep" (part three of "Prog Slaughter") plays like the theme to a film that doesn't exist (yet), with dread, longing, fear, flight, loneliness and the comfort that connection brings all perfectly, heartbreakingly conveyed through music--all in under five minutes. No instruments, indeed, but a whole lotta musical power, and who cares how it's made when that's the end result?
Copyright 2003: J. Eric Smith.
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