X27 – “Your Neu Favorite Band” CD 12/25:42 Despite the album title don’t be looking for any Krautrock here: this is more like someone appropriating Big Black’s old “skree” wall-of-guitar-sound and misapplying it to various sordid uses. Sometimes this has that distorto feel of what the more intense Chicagoans were pounding out in the 80s, sometimes they throb like they’re the Yank cousins of the Australian outfit X (somewhere around their first album), other times they seems like some swamp creature deciding to pay your garage a little visit and deciding to stay. Nice male/female vox as well. David @ www.narnackrecords.com |
Xin Xin – “Chapel of the Chimes” CD 5/18:19 Somewhat loopy, disjointed noise abstractions using stuff like mandolin, harmonium, string bass and sax. Aimless, but that’s necessarily bad in this context, except that they might just indulge in weirdness for it’s own sake. I like the metallic vocal on “Jennifer Lopez”, which almost rocks, abstractly. “King Earth” could be the Blue Nile on really bad blotter. The clatterous closer “Ceremony” comes close to fusing no wave, NY noise, and tribal industrial fragments into one. Right on! Anthony @ www.absolutelykosher.com |
Xiu Xiu – “Fabulous Muscles” CD 10/37:39 Even though they are as obscure as planet Pluto to the masses, these critical darlings could wallpaper the entire house with the rave reviews they’ve garnered from their previous records. Their disjointed non-sequiturs and awkward phrasings worm around the abstract disembodied sounds and somehow they produce highly listenable songs like “Crank Heart” that are way beyond playful. (“Lighting it up/You were so cool/Her school colors/Black and light black”) This is serious bizness. “I Luv The Valley” and “Bunny Gamer”, have a fractured, almost jazzy, superstructure built around art-rock infrastructures. The synth on “Little Panda McElroy” takes over with a warm vibraphone effect that fills the room. “Support Our Troops OH!” is upside down drug poetry slathered in layers of lint. (“Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a four year old girls head and look across her car seat down into her skull”) The title track is an acoustic walk through the land of the losers with a keen breathy vocal. “Brian The Vampire” is unlike any experimental noise rock you’ve ever heard, since it never really rocks. One writer called them “kind of like Arab On Radar fed through a blender with Joy Division and Captain Beefheart, but not really like any of those bands…” The whole affair is a delightfully uncomfortable, expansive nightmare replete with gruesome characters that make no sense in the light of day. My favorite track, “Clowne Towne” is pop noise of the highest order, and exactly what my band, Navajo Ace, has been trying to create for years. Damn them, but I adore this record. Anthony @ www.5RC.com MP3 Download |
 |
Shredding Radio Home Page |