There's a manic intensity about
Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog on the trio's fifth album, 2023's
Connection. It's an angry, end-of-your-rope kind of vibe
Ribot and his bandmates, bassist
Shahzad Ismaily and drummer
Ches Smith, have been cultivating since their 2008 debut,
Party Intellectuals, and one that took on a pugilistic urgency after the 2016 U.S. presidential election on 2017's
YRU Still Here? Following that record, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the band recorded
Hope, an album whose varied sonic and stylistic textures seemed to speak to their desire for both human and creative connectivity in a locked-down world. With its somewhat ironic title,
Connection feels like a reaction to that time, fueled by a realization that things were just going to get worse before they ever got better. Here,
Ribot and
Ceramic Dog push their vitriol about the state of the world to new heights, crafting an album that balances a sustained punk dread with moments of primal, yawping rage. The record opens with the title track, a slow-burning rumination on neurotic self-isolation that has the feeling of an argument where someone calls you out for never truly living happily in the moment, declaring, "you live your life like a spy 'bout to miss your connection." That the song also sounds something like
Lou Reed backed by
the Stooges speaks to the raw, garage-rock atmosphere
Ceramic Dog capture throughout much of the album. Equally potent is "Soldiers in the Army of Love," a spiraling,
Sonic Youth-esque anthem that literally cribs the "We hold these truths to be self-evident" line from the Declaration of Independence and turns it into a rallying cry against fascism and bigotry. There are also gorgeously evocative instrumental tracks like "Swan," where tenor saxophonist
James Brandon Lewis wails against the tidal wave of
Ribot's distorted guitar like
John Coltrane sitting in with
My Bloody Valentine. But where these tracks feel like reasoned protest songs, the histrionic "Heart Attack" is unfiltered idiot rage. Rapping with stentorian fury over a groove that sounds like a monkey beating on a garbage can while a police siren wails,
Ribot free-associates rhymed nonsense words, occasionally quoting other pop songs and dropping in bits of Italian like some kind of Pentecostal evangelical preacher having a stroke. The track is Dada, pure id, like
Allen Ginsberg ranting against heart attacks while having an actual heart attack. The less sense the song makes, the more you feel like
Ribot and
Ceramic Dog are tapping into a kind of collective exasperation with the world, the failure of the human body, and the way truth seems to evade us. ~ Matt Collar
