Music journalism is performed in words, not in music. Thus the infamous quote to the effect that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture": words are often inadequate to the task of describing what listening to music feels like. Most journalists, therefore, end up putting a disproportionate emphasis on lyrics, since lyrics, like journalism, consist of words. This four-song EP's the joke on them. Casual listeners will pick up a few stray, coherent phrases, hear the rest as syllables that scan and sound like English phonemes, and rest content assuming that if they were to listen more clearly, the expected words would be there for them. Lest the point of this EP be missed, the lyrics are printed in the insert. And they in fact prove to be exactly stray phrases and singable phonemes - but prove also to be not always resolvable into words. The chorus of "Fall Again" is typical: "all day so / they boge in do bo / when they call the name / of they sing or they / I bmal bahl / hope they leave / and fall again." (If you're lucky, no one will have run a spellcheck over that.) Okay, so a percentage of the listening public (approximately equal to those who cast ballots for Monica Moorhead for President) has dutifully been appealed to. The rest of us want to know what this sounds like. Oldham's cracked vocals are set in a sort of acid chamber-folk setting: the melodies and chords are straightforward and tuneful, and the arrangements (by Jim O'Rourke) are elaborate and odd, featuring the Chicago Mafia playing everything from organ to cello to french horn and pedal steel. The cover shot, showing Murphy and Oldham solemnly posed in Georgian finery, is set against the back cover shot showing the two in the same finery, having taken a pratfall on a parquet floor. If all of this makes sense to you - better yet, if you're suppressing a rich giggle at the whole thing - then you'll enjoy this. If you find yourself asking "but why?"...then you probably won't.

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