Negative Neighborhood - Salt Orchard

Negative Neighborhood - Salt Orchard

2:50

Salt Orchard, 2018

Written by Kieran Harris, Max Souders, and Ben Zamarron

This is some far-out, Zappa-tinged jazz rock.  The vocals are powerful, insistent if not operatic, a sort of half-talking, half-droning that commands the listener.  The lyrics begin in a very American-tinged French: "Qu'est-ce qu tu fais / Qu'est-ce que tu dis / Mon longue [langue?] était bon et tu es une rie."  The English part, when it comes, may not be any more intelligible to Anglophone ears: "Any day but you seem not to know my / And then there she stood / The helm of her negative neighborhood."  Whether these are genuinely surreal lyrics, deliberately garbled ones, or simply impossible to decipher, the effect is the same. Meaning takes a back seat to sound.  It's impressionistic, free-form, a fusion of bop and rock, and it grabs your attention, nonsense notwithstanding.