Pleasure Tax – Pleasure Tax

Pleasure Tax is Jeannine Lonardo (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Shutaro’s Roadhouse Band)

Real life absurdity meets fevered hallucinations.
Digital worms, psychotic realms, disconnect, bodies of water, and druids.

“You are the Last Earplug Texas Laureate. You go up-a-street to the Upas Tree and you don’t palter, because you know the tree’s poisonous aroma is just a gas, a myth. You gather its seeds. Pearls for mortar and pestle. This is how we make strychnine.

How much fun is too much fun? Let’s ask Pleasure Tax. Yes, systems of control are conspiring to colonize and co-opt your libido as we scroll and breathe, but Jeannine Lonardo, here in her solo debut LP, is donning the finest for the best little Shit House in the world, and by world we may or may not mean the Druid Grove Ceremony via Zoom.

Aren’t we all licking honey from the razorblade these days? Yes, here we have just the right amount of fun: viola, piano, berimbau, water bottle, sanding block, baritone sax, guzheng, 3D printer, accordion, caxixi, melodica, vibraslap and omnichord synthesize into pulsating plexus alongside the traditional vocals, guitar, bass and drums. What you get on your end is eight finely constructed tunes with names like Loch, Cerridwen, Sprite, Aura Maps, How to Meet Yourself—audio-travelogue as Analeptic Wings through The Pagan Archipelago. Pleasure Tax is a guide that understands the narrow difference between medicine and poison, the cure and its exact opposite.

If The Raincoats’ Odyshape with This Heat’s Charles Hayward and his junkyard gamelan additions, or those Messthetics comps with cubist edges sanded down through benzo rings, or Kleenex/Liliput in a Swiss Alp bunker studio translating Captain Blicero as “Rough Trade” palpitates your third earlobe, then speak to your liquorice pizza accountant about Pleasure Tax today.

Jim Marlowe co-pilots this assemblage from the control room of his End of an Ear Recording Studio in Louisville, KY. This marks the first vinyl release on his Newton’s Kidney imprint, following two stellar CD’s by Equipment Pointed Ankh and the duo of Dan Melchior and Marlowe.” -Kaptain Molasses