The Limiñanas :: Crystal Anis :: Hozac

This is psych for simpletons.  Ye-Ye for yes men.  Fortunately for you and me, I get by with three chords, a couple dusty organ grooves, and a tambourine that gets more love than Paula Dean's saltshaker.  The southern-France natives return here with their second LP (following 2010's self-titled on Trouble In Mind), still sounding like a covered-wagon caravan of time-traveling gypsy-ravers passing in the night.  With Crystal Anis, they've stripped some (some) jangle for more riff-based jams.  Opener "Salvation" is an immediate welcoming, slipping and rattling like the B-52s stuck in a Morricone Mesopotamia.  The record deviates from here based on how wonky the electric guitar can get (tremolo or vibrato -- who cares??), but the tone throughout is a cohesive '70s cop eating acid-soaked donut holes while chasing candy thieves.  It just depends on when he's eating and when he's chasing, is all.  Heavy, heavy stuff.

Taste the rainbow over at Hozac.  Listen below...
 

Wet Hair :: Spill Into Atmosphere :: De Stijl

A bit of quiet time to blast my ears out, an empty house to welcome in my unholy hosts, a fresh-cooked meal to scrape into the garbage and opt for leftovers, three open beds to pass out on the hardwood floor.  Must be the Olympics.  Naked dudes diving in unison, Ning Ding playing ping pong, etc.

Wet Hair release a new long-player so simultaneously adventurous and cohesive, it could only come from the collective mind of three rigid aesthetes.  Makes sense, then, that it's borne of Night-People label-heads Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes, with the additional help of newcomer Justin Thye.  The textures that kick off the record are as fucked up as chewing on fluorescent tubes and chasing them with twizzler reduction, but as the songs unfold, the atmosphere of three-dudes-in-a-room becomes absolutely conceivable.  Live drums, dry bass, and swarms of poison sawtooth leads are the basic ingredients.  Relentlessly positive in execution, this record holds resemblance to kraut overachievers La Dusseldorf - kicking up red dust in a martian garage, with battle cries to push onward.  Only on "Blank Sunday" does a drum-program surface, fully servicing the album's transit and providing a purely kitsch respite.  Seven songs deep, 40 minutes long, and one ear-spanning worm wide - I've been cheering adolescent girls in uneven bars more enthusiastically than ever.


Reed is sane enough to not release material on his own label, so pick up a copy over at De Stijl and start getting excited about interstellar ladder-climbing. 

News :: Upcoming Shows :: August

08/16 :: Chelsea Wolfe/Russian Circles :: Rock and Roll Hotel
08/21 :: Lightning Bolt :: Rock and Roll Hotel
08/22 :: Brian Jonestown Massacre :: 9:30 Club