Mozart was a freemason. While still a baby, he was gifted a magic !ute on which he wrote all his tunes. Some of them are still around. Even so, the best way to gift-wrap your head around The Secret Degree, the latest release from Xentos Fray Bentos (guitars, keys, voice) and Ted 'Tebbs' Barrow (circuit-bending, percussion) is to picture it as a town. A town full of pity: Five blocks long, forty miles north of nowhere, with an empty gas station, a closed up diner and the smoking remains of a Freemason's Hall, recently burnt to the ground by a pack of incensed villagers fresh out of a Universal Pictures' Frankenstein. In among the pitted ruins sit Ted and Xentos,plucking and slapping their instruments, busily exploring the folkish blue roots that underpin today's music making and trying to figure out how we got to where we're at. Feel free to roll up one leg of your pants, curl up a sleeve and join them on this nimble trip through an imaginary landscape of coltishly cultivated harmonies, mind-jingling melodies, all tempered by the occasional banshee wail of an untameable circuit. Two Square Why? Indeed. Why not?
