From what I can gather, Cor As Bakon is one Gerald Castro. He is a musician and artist who also releases work under the monikers GPV-C, Derivitive, and Cord-Tangled. According to his label website, "Queens County" is "an album inspired by and embodying the death of the person responsible for giving me life," by which I would assume his mother, but hey, you never know. The disc consists of nine tracks all named after various years of the 1980s (1981, 1984, 1987, etc.) and range from all-out noise assaults to barely audible, manipulated samples or electronics.

As a whole, the album seems to consist of a random assortment of sounds and aesthetics. One example of this (also a particularly odd part of the album) is "1981." It alternates between silence, sheets of fuzzed-out samples (I think it's an old blues song, but I could be wrong), and a chunky metal guitar riff with pounding drum machine, which is interspersed with a distorted voice saying "wuh." Each of the sections drop in and out at odd intervals throughout the track. Is that point that 1981 was a year of great variety and contradiction? Or does it mean that Castro had a bunch of leftover sounds that he wanted to jam into something? Beats me. Like much of the rest of the tracks, it seems like Cor As Bakon is searching for what each piece should be and falling short of finding the final destination. Another example of this is the last track, "1988." It begins with a serene synthesizer tone, but after a short time sounds like little more than the gears softly turning in some type of appliance. These alternating waves of synth and low noise go on for eleven-and-a-half minutes. Riveting.

"Queens County" is a lot of things, but unfortunately what it is not is coherent or particularly interesting. The jumps between loud/soft and ambiance/blistering effects occur far too often, at times even within the same track. These types of shifts can certainly work, but in the context of "Queens County" it's difficult to see what keeps everything together. Certainly, parts of the album might very well speak to a personal portion of the artist's life, that same feeling is not communicated to the listener. In short, it's hard to tell what the goal was with this album and it gets tedious waiting around to try and figure it out. 2/10 -- Matt Blackall (3 September, 2008)