Life On Bob-Lo Island
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.407) CDR $8.00
Your man inside Coaxial Arts in Los Angeles remains an outsider lurking in the dreams of discarded mannequins. This concept album, about an abandoned amusement park outside of Detroit, Michigan — with its wooden rollercoasters, funhouse, drunk clowns, buzzing taffy machines, identical twins on the boardwalk, poisoned water slides — which became a hobo squat, a decrepit kingdom where strange men lurked, a sort of island of the dammed, cloaks Detroit darkness in a clown’s shroud. Holes puncture a laughing reality as a mask of spinning dice reveals the corroded dream: children playing in yellow haze, black corn swaying to the machines, families disappearing into the night like Polaroids developing in reverse, dogs conspiring with the shadows, machine laugher trapped in the bog, a UFO made of straw slowly crashing into a black swamp, abandoned vacations vacated by lost men. Give one an offering and maybe he’ll tell you a story.