ORCUTT, BILL - THE FOUR LOUIES (LP)

Bill Orcutt's latest release for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly melds these audio landmarks. Fittingly, Reich described Four Organs as "the longest V-I cadence in the history of Western Music," and as such, it neatly envelops all of Louie Louie within its single chord. Intuiting this, Orcutt deftly overlays the opening salvos of these sonic cognates into a zig-zagging 4/4 cadence, which unfolds over side one with an incongruously conventional rock dynamic structure. The Four Organs' sustained organ threads suggest Louie Louie's vocal line, whether by accident or Orcutt's design. Organ drones dominate Side 2, with Louie Louie forced into counterpoint. We can hear just how out of tune the Kingsmen were, unsalvageable by any pitch correction software, with that damned maraca inexplicably sliding into a pulsing but syncopated 6-beat bar ending with the door-slam finality of the original Kingsmen 45.