Some of you’ve probably got the idea by now that Fly Ashtray sing about Vieques or the diminishing rainforest, which they don’t, though I do wish that those of you for whom decrying social and ecological injustice seems inherently “boring” would just swallow mercury right now and have done with it. No, Fly Ashtray’s ideology is rather the ideology of the pinball machine, or of the video game: the demonstration that a game in play is its own treatise on the nature of the world we live in and our interactions within it. Fly Ashtray’s lyrics are generally extremely funny, though how funny they are usually doesn’t dawn on you until the fifth or sixth listen, which makes quoting them fairly pointless. I got the giggles for fifteen minutes while washing the dishes after hearing the line “We’re poor/and have been up to heretofore” in Sawgrass Subligette’s title track, but you’d have to hear it yourself to see how communicative a line it is. Indeed, the whole album, and most of James Kavoussi’s other work, falls into the you’d-have-to-hear-it-yourself side of things. Most of the adjectives in my critical arsenal, set to the task of trying to say what Fly Ashtray sounds like, end up sounding like they’re describing something else.
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-LPTJ-
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