ACR (Aaron Charles Read) - Soapsud Clown
Self-Released
Released on January 24th, 2024
Aaron Charles Read is many things— comedian, visual artist, actor, and maker of bizarre missives and rants across media, from webseries to Instagram reels. He is also an outstanding songwriter and musician, and he’s been sporadically releasing a multivarious array of music over the past ten years under the moniker ACR.
Across these disciplines, I think there’s something of a unifying aesthetic at work, combining a scrappy, do-it-yourself spirit, and a rapidfire Dadaist sense of humor. This hamster wheel radio of ideas spins out into gloriously scrawled cartoons and collages, mixing scraps of paper with gouache, sharpie, marker and crayon drawings of melted characters and lysergic landscapes, rendered in sometimes vibrant multi-chromatic hues, sometimes monochrome pen and pencil. Perspectives bend and wiggle and warp, perversion slinking beneath the surface, child-like wonder at an overwhelming world writ large.
It's this spirit that suffuses the beautiful, hilarious, obtuse, sincere, joyful and generous music of Read’s EP Soapsud Clown. The faux howdy-doody affectations of “Evil in My Head” kick off the show as the narrator tumbles through a waterfall of intrusive thoughts, troubled by macabre images. The crookedly flowing guitar work on “Soapsud Clown” nods to Sonic Youth and Don Caballero, but this initial, haunted pace quickly pivots into something brighter, ecstatic: melody after melody unfolds atop a driving rhythm, culminating in a dazzling chorus. It is a luminous display of Read’s skill as a composer of melodies, and it makes for a striking climax.
Speaking of climax, my personal favorite on the EP is “Premature Ejaculation.” Read takes what might appear on the surface to be a silly opening line and treats it with a touching sincerity, expanding it into a song about loss, guilt, and atonement. The plaintive cadence of “Time With You” is sweetly romantic, reflecting on family, love, and days past. “Jumbo Jet” returns to the affected country-isms, with Read’s wonderfully elastic vocals crooning and cracking as he paints a pointillist narrative of gender, the self, sex, love, and Andy Kaufman. The EP ends with an instrumental, mixing a recording of birds from Umeå, a sinewy guitar loop recorded on an iPhone, and Read hitting the drums as hard as he can.
In the liner notes, Read namechecks a veritable brick of influences, some surely meant to be a joke (Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, Seinfeld Season 9) but overall revealing a deep love of 20th century spiritual and free jazz (Albert Ayler, Pharoah Saunders, Alice Coltrane) and experimental music across the spectrum (Black Dice, This Heat, Hella). What is also revealed in his liner notes is a deep love for his friends, his community, his family. Through this intentional intimacy, the music is completely freed of all pretentiousness; any obscurity or in-jokes and references meant for a handful of people still land for listeners outside the circle. The heartfelt observations are not grasping at meaning, either: by evading linear storytelling, something greater, more ineffable is conjured in the negative space. Read does not fill in the blanks; the music is there for you, however you want it, whatever you might bring to it, but the connective tissue is a cat-fucked ball of yarn strewn on the basement floor. Don’t clean it up: take a breath. Stand back and laugh, enjoying the spectacular mess.
- Harman Burns
