Distorting Time is the sixth album by Radiator Hospital, the project of prolific Philadelphia singer-songwriter Sam Cook-Parrott, whose 19th-century ancestor Big Nose George Parrott was equivalently prolific in horse theft, railway banditry, and murder. The elder Parrott was the ringleader of an outlaw gang that terrorized a godforsaken stretch of southern Wyoming known as Rattlesnake Canyon. Although Big Nose George—whose beak was, truly, enormous—did attempt to escape from jail 10 days before his scheduled execution, using a pocket knife to saw through the rivets of his shackles, he was ultimately thwarted by the jailer’s wife, hanged from the crossbar of a telegraph pole by a mob of 200 men, and, when the rope broke, hanged again, ultimately choking to death; he was then skinned by a local surgeon named John Eugene Osborne, who tanned Big Nose George’s hide and made of it a fine pair of leather shoes, which he subsequently wore on the occasion of his inaugural ball as the first Democratic governor of the state of Wyoming.
There is one song on Distorting Time about Cook-Parrott’s notorious ancestor: “Ballad of Big Nose George Parrott.” It’s a spare acoustic track—recorded, as with every song on this record, on a four-track cassette. It is haunting. It has no choice but to haunt; it concerns the conversion of a man’s skin into shoes, his skullcap into an ashtray. It stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it, impelling me to learn all I could about Cook-Parrott’s ancestor—an impressive feat for such a slight, minimal song, and a demonstration of Cook-Parrott’s command as a storyteller.
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Cook-Parrott drew the title of his new album from the Oblique Strategies, a set of prompts Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt devised to aid artists in overcoming creative blocks. Urged by the strategies to distort time, Cook-Parrott has produced a great song about his Wild West forefather and a dozen songs about growing up, growing old, and growing weary of the Trump administration.
Many friends and D.I.Y.-scene fellows have populated and played with Radiator Hospital over the years, most notably members of Waxahatchee and Swearin’. But Distorting Time is, like Cook-Parrott’s 2019 outing Sings Music for Daydreaming, a solo record. He’s always drawn inspiration from K Records and the broader tradition of home recording, but the fidelity here is especially low. His guitar, bass, keyboards, and drum machines fight constantly with static and fuzz; his lyrics are even more distorted, all vowels, his voice stretching words like taffy. It’s tough to hold onto more than a phrase or two at a time. The record sounds, at times, amateurish. But Cook-Parrott knows his way around this equipment; every choice is deliberate. “Let’s let it be nothing,” he sings at one point; his intention is to lower his own stakes, to have a little fun.
And some tracks are very fun, like the charging “Hellhound.” There is a brief hitch before its sick guitar solo, a top-of-the-roller-coaster moment that makes its sickness all the more sublime. The keyboards here call to mind early video-game scores; they might have soundtracked a fight with a final boss on a Sega Dreamcast. Other instrumentals similarly evoke memories of plastic controllers and carpeted basements, especially the programmed loops of “Weekend Interlude.” I found myself reminded of Floral Shoppe, browned in Polaroid sepia and blanketed in dust.
