The Rubber Room column is a weekly look at recent and notable releases that don’t fall into the rubric of traditional reviews or reviewed material—namely 7”’s, 12”’s, 3” CDs, EPs, cassette-only, DVDs and MP3-only releases.

Professor Murder
Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP
[Kanine, 2006]

The Professor wouldn't actually murder anyone, but people might shy away from him on the subway. He (the band-as-single-entity) has been listening to sounds of Brooklyn, but he decided to take only what he liked of dance-punk and screw around with it a bit, adding harmonica when necessary. Takes the funk and kicks it around some more until it's from another planet (not George Clinton's). Adds an a cappella track "Pedigree" that sounds like a throwaway that was too well-executed to leave in the trash. Like I say, he smells funny, but he wouldn't kill anyone.
[Justin Cober-Lake]

Vanessa Peters
Blackout EP
[Little Sandwich Music, 2006]

You know the formula—Vanessa Peters sings and plays acoustic guitar—but that doesn't mean you know the record. You don't know why a seemingly inside-joke reference to her absent band, Ice Cream on Mondays, turns out to be a lyrical meme on simple joy in darkness, or how band-as-food reverses the life-as-performance meme that matches it, or that sort of removal of emotional meaning itself gets upended when it turns out the hero and the heroine laugh because they can, or whether that laughter is itself only a performance limited to the acting a couple does to get by. Vanessa Peters sounds exactly like you'd expect, except she expresses the unexpected expertly.
[Justin Cober-Lake]

A. Jarvis
The Widow Myth
[First Person, 2006]

This four track 3” CD-R feels more like a career sampler than just the latest mind food parcel from Andy Jarvis. From the opening tracks manic caterpillar pulse and warm salt-water drone, Jarvis slams dunks into “I Defend a Wet Body”s Chris Corsano vs. Mike Tyson percussion punch up. Drones in coiling slow motion fill out the following “Sing in Duet with Transparent Time” with a much subtler organ feel. The best is saved for last though, with an electrostatic octopus of light and sound clash that lashes through the receptive mushy bits of the brain. Perfect.
[Scott McKeating]

V/VM 365
“On the Beach (The Girls Remix)” (230606)
[V/VM, 2006]

Sung by the newly installed empress of the Axis of Evil, this robotic Chris Rea assault is one of the best hacked-up interpretations ever. The infamous guitar line is rendered as a metal chime, like some bent Depeche Mode keyboard riff. But the real killer here is what has happened to the song’s bottom end, replacing what I imagine is some acid jazz bullshit noodling. A pealing midnight doomy bell gives the whole thing a creepy crawling swing, making you wonder what exactly is happening down at the beach.
[Scott McKeating]

Ashtray Navigations
Cante Jodido Lookalike Contest
[First Person, 2006]

This live trio release, under the steadily hazed-out helm of Phil Todd, sees Melanie Delaney and Phil Legard hitch a lift with the Ashtray Navigations brand. In the centre of this twenty-minute rip is a guitar part that is trying to avoid slipping down the cracks of its imposed mutant buckling. A fiery jazz-rock heart glows white hot in a rising hiss of radio abuse, bursts of yellow noise and sounds full of eastern promise from the seventies. Eventually Todd finds a foothold and hoists himself onto his metaphorical cairn, sending out six-string bagpipe vibes through air as thick as space cake. These passages of euphoric storm make it all the more difficult to understand why he chose such a thoroughly unpleasant word as Ashtray for this project.
[Scott McKeating]