Mark D
The Silent Treatment
Tee Pee
Considering all the glowing press he’s been getting in the hallowed pages of Terrorizer recently • not to mention his resume, which includes a stint as a Melvin • Mark D’s debut, The Silent Treatment, comes as something of a disappointment. Granted, D’s penchant for low-end thump-groove continues unabated here, but what he chooses to do with it is an entirely different story. At nearly 53 minutes, The Silent Treatment moves panoramically at times, rather disjointed and half-baked at others (mostly), its 16 tracks looking less like real “songs” and more like incomplete sketches. And that could’ve worked to D’s advantage had he cultivated the Sabbath-gone-Bristol bits (“Toshiro Mifune,” “Coffinmakers Complaint”) here and there, but more often than not, D and drummer John Evans merely locate a “stoner rock” convention, isolate it, and generously dab it with boringly ambient textures n’ fixings • altogether, a worthy idea at its core, just lazily executed in a post-ironic sigh that’d make Jon Spencer smirk with satisfaction. Still, there’s a smug, coolly detached air to the album, but for the time being, Mark D’s getting the silent treatment from me.
Tee Pee Records, PO Box 20307, New York, NY 10009; http://www.teepeerecords.com
