Spin Kicking Hipsters
One of my favorite records in the genre to this day is From Dayton with Love by Morella's Forest - a little known noise pop combo led by a shy sounding lass named Sydney Rentz whose pixie voice often got lost in its wanderings amidst the labyrinthian feedback and swirling melodies provided by her band mates. They recorded only a handful of records before fading into obscurity, a fate none of them likely wished to see as they were quite vocal in their platitudes to be big time pop stars - if Sonic Youth were able to marry dissonance to halfway poppy melodies, why couldn't Morella's Forest? Alas, they left behind a small but high quality catalogue of music that would have been far better received today in the face of the lo-fi revival than when they first recorded the stuff back in the mid 90's.
With re-issue labels popping up by the dozen these days making sure fans of niche sounds hear things they may missed the first time, perhaps some brave soul will come around and pluck Morella out of obscurity. Local Chicago upstarts BLVD records have done that with one such project, the little known and quite moody Astrobrite. Their overlooked record, Crush, received its first outing on the vinyl format a few months back and perhaps folks will pay attention this time.
A child awash in a wave of mutilation.
Having found a copy of this record used, I picked it up with only a base knowledge of its sound - with BLVD shilling it by way of comparisons to My Bloody Valentine (of course) and Slowdive, I sampled the clips on iTunes and took the leap. The first time I put the record on, I was lost in e-mails and piles of cook books attempting to compose the week's menu for various clients I do meal replacement for. My ears picked out faint resemblances to Fold Zandura, another band of the era who were attempting to perfect the noise pop angle while casting shimmering melodies onto the table with all the gusto of a desperate gambler playing craps. The drum machine, buried behind the dense layers of guitars, punches its way through just enough to be noticed, but the fog of the chords overwhelms it, forcing the artificial hi hats and snares back into the murk where they ought to be.
With records of this type, it's impossible to pin point both their influences as well as how the records themselves may have potentially influenced those who digested them. On some songs, the rumble of distort-o-matic guitar walls and nimble disembodied vocals sound exactly like the ticket Bradford Cox was looking for while hatching his escape plan in some far off Atlanta suburb - certainly much of Deerhunter's current output is predicated on the same ideas of ethereal vocals accompanied by ambient wizardry, though their version is a bit more baked than what can be found on Crush.
While I don't know much about the mastermind behind these recordings, nor any of the rest of his output, I'm certainly hoping that this new splash of attention on this decade old batch of tunes will compel him to toil further, perhaps honing what can be heard on Crush to even more of a science. With Kevin Shields all but absent, it's not like Astrobrite have alot in the way of competition what with everyone from Eat Skull and their media described shitgaze to such acts as Hozac signed Woven Bones more interested in figuring out a way to mine yet another angle of Psycho Candy. While the noise pop field is certainly stuffed to the point of bursting these days, not too many folks are attempting to figure out how to meld studio trickery and guitar squall into one cohesive glob while keeping the tempo smoother than rolling clouds on a summer day in the deep South. Pure, unfiltered noise by way of completely filtered guitar moving at a snail's pace hasn't been this enjoyable in quite some time.
No comments:
Post a Comment