SD10
Bumbrella Donkey - Miscommunication
cdr with drawing and booklet. silk-screened cover. sealed with spiderman band-aids.
Released 2007
50 copies

Nick Hoffman: Drums, Voice
Mike Hamende: Guitar
Marc Hamende: Bass


Track List:

1.      Call me (:23)
2.      Have just (:38)
3.      Colorland now (:24)
4.      Bad Karma (:25)
5.      Become a barn (2:02)
6.      Roy G Biv (:16)
7.      A housefly, somehow alive in January, becomes trapped in a light fixture (:08)
8.      Banana spirit (1:00)
9.      Where’s my Arrow (:11)
10.    Neck solo (:24)
11.    Color trail Rabbit (:47)
12.    Meant to snake (:28)
13.    Midwest Love (:54)
14.    Miscommunication (:27)
15.    Mystic drops (:51)
16.    Mechanicolor (:21)
17.    Poltergeist (:11)
18.    Sound shower (2:07)
19.    Black cloud (2:14)
20.    Clear (1:18)
21.    Missing squid (:44)
22.    Metafizz ocean (:46)
23.    Eternal everything (1:46)


Heathen Harvest Review:

With only six songs barely eking beyond the one minute mark it is difficult to get to know Bumbrella Donkey much on this, their debut release, recorded in one and a half hours to produce just over eighteen minutes of spasms, vomits of guitar noise and chaos by way of traditional instruments and tape loops. It is a very punk affair, and as self-proclaimed aficionados of the Futurist movement where speed and violence combined with energy and machines feature prominently the influence is most assuredly there.

Guitar. Bass. Drums. Vocals. Perhaps some tape loops... given some of the sounds, but in the short time to record this album, it’s a little hard to imagine. Twisted and distorted chugs of guitar and bass growl and fray, squeal and scream, often in short bursts that only hint at songs that never come. Percussion clatters a horrid mess of steel and skin, fragmenting grenade like in cyclones of deformed string experimentation. Then there are the eerie quiet moments, shorn of the bursting fusillades and left dusted in echoic spaces scratching their weird atmosphere. When vocals do front the microphone they are bleating or razored shouts and rants lost in distortion and the general rapidity of the furore behind.

While this might not be an album for repeated listens there are some very interesting tracks here of odd noise and spazzed-out rock (that never quite gets to being fully epileptic) that hint at what might be if they had a little more time recording, but unfortunately that would be deleterious to their overall ethos. You have to admire their spunk.

The packaging by Scissor Death continues the DIY ethos and scrappy heyday of the punk era. A card digifile sleeve is painted via stencil with some type of weird animal. Within a booklet, eight pages in black & white on low-grade paper redolent with imagery of the recording session and the CDr stickered with a felt-pen drawn smiley face – this edition was green.