Do The Headless Chicken(s)

Really liked the one album I heard by these guys around '86 or so (wish I still had it), but the Flyin Nun album (well, EP actually) that I thought was even weirder (and less Flying Nun like) at the time was the one by the Puddle (which I reviewed in the Village Voice, and put in my year-end top ten, but stupidly also got rid of during some moving purge in the '90s.) Anybody remember them? Anybody have any idea whatever happened to them? How hard is their EP to find two decades later? Etc...

hey chuck--

yeah the puddle is def. pretty un-fn-like, and i'd totally forgotten about them, actually.

somehow i think they might have been connected to the renderers (possibly the least xpressway-ish xp. act)? or maybe not.

but they have a myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/thepuddlenz

and a new record:
http://www.insanitywetrust.com/Puddle.htm

seems like a lot of nz acts are getting back together of late. hidey ho.

i think their album was 'into the moon'? it's here on cd for under $20, though with shipping it might be a little pricey since they're overseas...

http://www.gemm.com/item/PUDDLE/INTO--THE--MOON/GML1417867025/

the puddle love is always a bit of a mystery. is it because he's inherently creepy? but then i love Mink and he's a driving force there but that's probably down to demarnia lloyd and genevieve mclean. allegedly mink are extant, no idea if anything is forthcoming. the puddle release excellent singles and terrible albums. into the moon and pop lib are always lauded, so mediocre.

Pop Lib is the one I liked (and the only one I ever heard.) Here's what I said I liked about it in a Voice review at the time: "Two women and four men playing borrowed instruments they haven't learned yet. The sextet's got a bona fide kidlike kidding quality, and seems happy just to be speaking through their incompetence to make us understand why love gets them twisted. Mistakes don't matter, and the soundmix is horrible (therefore awesome) -- three times in the first track there's this dense electronic buzz that sounds like a fan accidentally switched on, or a fuse blew; nowhere are the players and/or vocals entirely in sync. Lindsay Maitland honks French horn like Lora Logic blew sax, just exhaling every which way 'til a sound comes out that means something to him. Everything's carried along on a simple drum-tap and a two-note bassline or Casiotone-riff; George Henderson's rhythm guitar, apparently untuned, computes Mobius-strip equations. But there's shape and structure, drifting off like supernal marshmallows, tensing up with microcosmic repetition, erupting into absolute, uncontrolled wrath." (Whatever the heck all that means. I went on to compare the song "Spaceship #9" to Amon Duul and "Junk", to the Velvet Undeground's "Heroin" by way of "My Girl," which are quoted in its lyrics.)

Weirdly, here's what I write earlier in the piece: "This was all set to be a review of Headless Chickens, by New Zealanders of the same name: trumped-up gargoyle-gurgle, solidly conistent, like if the Buttholes' Another Man's Sac was 'pop' instead of 'rock.'" I say it was one of my most-played albums of 1987, but I apparently got fed up by what hit me as "willful weirdness." I never explain what made their weirdness seem so willful.