As a project, Cogwheel Dogs, the stage name of singer-sonwriter Rebecca Mosley and cellist Tom Parnell can only be described as-oh dear-absolutely barking. Writing a song about a herb growing down the back of your kitchen sink is scarcely the height of craziness, but it provides a solid platform on which to build the edifice of caprice which is encapsulated in this EP. And you know what? Some of it is really great.
The title track can only be described as the lovechild of Polly Harvey and Captain Beefheart, with Shostakovich as godfather. The good Captain also wrote about erratic vegetables, in ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’, but the connection between the artists is above all musical. Specifically, Mosley and Parnell, just like the musical treasure that is Don Van Vliet managed decades ago, seem to have come up with a new take on that most conservative song form, the blues. We are a long way from Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson here, but the flat sevenths and above all Mosley’s husky, soulful voice are suggestive of nothing else. There are moments on Harvey’s 1995 masterpiece ‘To Bring You My Love’ album which are recalled, but Parnell’s cello, deployed using violent, atonal scrapes guarantees that ‘Cress’ sounds like little you’ve heard.
To my ears, Parnell has-oh dear-slipped his leash on the next track ‘Anticoagulant’, which in another world could have been covered by Blink 182 or Green Day. The aggression and busy-ness of the cello on this track renders it simply ghastly to listen to, and I’d much prefer it if Mosley were to perform it solo.
You have to hand it to that design classic, the typewriter, master of the comeback. Not only does it have a starring role in last year’s ‘Atonement’ (that manipulative nonsense which deserved an Oscar, it was so worthy and mediocre), but Mosley and Parnell have pressed it into service as percussion on the suitably-spectral ‘Ghostwriter’. Here, Rebecca reveals her versatility, losing the bluesy edge and singing in a limpid, blanched style redolent of Sinead O’Connor. The voice and cello are back in balance here, and the results are bleakly wonderful.
It will be interesting to see if Cogwheel Dogs has a long future. The duo certainly push at the boundary of what can be classed as popular music, and the extreme oddness of songs like ‘Cress’ will limit the extent of their appeal. That said, I’m glad they are around, and their success on XFM suggests that the punters may not be as fatally addicted to blandness as the doom-mongers imagine.