5 out of 5

Label: Grey Flat Records

Producer: Drums & Tuba?

This little snippet of excellence showcases all the fun and funk of early D & T without some of the wandering excess that can be found on the albums.  It sounds ridiculously clean for an indie 7″, and sports a fun yellow-toned cover that has a rambling story on the front with a connecting ‘map’ matching the story on the back.  Side A’s ‘Officer Pieper’ is D&T with vocals years before ‘Battles Olé,’ the catch being that these aren’t really serious vocals… just a dude shouting over some punk rock jammin’, akin to A Minor Forest or Hubcap, the latter being especially applicable since Jay Ryan did the artwork.  But the song is short and sweet and doesn’t stretch out the tale to any ridiculous extremes… in fact, it’s such a direct blast of Drums & Tuba in full swing that you wished it lasted longer.  But on to side B’s ‘Borscht,’ which takes ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ (I think, or one of those recognizable thematic tunes) and tweedles it horn-like while our other instruments go crazy atop it.  Fittingly, ‘Noise Song’ is the least noisy of the trio, coming closer to the kind of rock groove the band would swing into on later releases like ‘Mostly Ape.’  It’s interesting how lacking this is in the jazzy klezmer stuff that they otherwise employed at the time.  The face that these are actually pretty great tracks and that they aren’t collected elsewhere (to my knowledge) makes it a required purchase, which is sorta cool to actually have a 7″ that gives you legit reasons to listen to it.  That’s right, I’m a jaded digital-music era bastard, what’re you gonna’ do.