These three groups showed us just how difficult it can be to marry lyricism with a sense of adventure and a musical space that allows for the song to flow to its own internal logic. Dead Rat Orchestra start up with some pugnacious and shambolic bass drum and violin rollickings, but begin to create something interesting when they spark up a pump organ, let a mournful violin play a tune very, very slowly, and then begin dropping hundreds of metal hexagonal coins onto the concrete floor of Cafe Oto, setting up a constant drone of chiming static, before destroying a large log of wood with hatchets to provide a rhythmic setting for a medieval-sounding intonation.
Duke Garwood is an absolute revelation, conjuring a drunken jazz-blues out of his guitar, and decorating it with slurred simplicities: "I'm gonna drive you home, cos you're all alone", and never saying or playing anything for longer than is necessary to bring his character to life, at which point he stops the song and lets the character become another ghost; crowds of them populate the room by the time he's done.
Wooden Wand is a wonderful songwriter, but his observational and florid lyrical style and "read-about-it-in-a-book" subject matter keeps him from truly casting a spell. 
