VIDEO PREMIERE: The Shows - Limerence

Laura Kerry

No matter how fuzzy and high-energy, three-piece bands often make music whose constituent parts each stand out. In the case of Bellingham, Washington natives The Shows, the trio is comprised of one drummer, one guitarist who sings, and a dedicated vocalist. In their full-length debut from last year, Signifier, each of these parts plays a big role. The small shifts in each can change the whole dynamic.

In the music video for “Limerence,” the second single from that album, the visual details play a similarly weighty role. The video uses only two settings—a stage emerging from a dark room with a colorful geometric backdrop and, at the end, a garage—with the trio playing their song all the way through. Relying only on the performers, camera movements, and cuts, it calls attention to the sound. Everything absorbs the moody, off-kilter tone of the track and takes on added significance as a result. The way the drummer bobs stoically; the movements of the guitarist’s eyes; the accentuated shapes of the singer’s mouth; the close-up shots as the singer belts, “Come close to me / Far from everything”—each element feels important in its own right, awash in a slightly sinister energy. In "Limerence," as is the case for the band itself, a little goes a long way.

REVIEW: Marbled Eye - EP

Laura Kerry

Marbled Eye’s “Former” begins with guitar feedback that rings out like an alarm. It grows louder slowly, and subtly dips before another guitar starts its anxious pattern along to urgent drums. This introduction, the first few notes of the band’s new EP, isn’t complicated or particularly strange, but it demands the listener’s attention and signals what’s to come in four songs of jittery post-punk. As “Former” marches on through audacious guitar licks, moments of dissonance, and monotone vocals, the feedback sounds occasionally in the background, keeping the listener on edge just as she begins to settle into Marbled Eye’s propulsive rhythms.

A group of four started by Chris Natividad and Michael Lucero, Marbled Eye’s members come from other Bay Area bands, including Meat Market, Golden Drugs, and Unity. This, combined with the uptempo post-punk on their self-titled EP from last year, has earned them some buzz and comparisons to Total Control, Kraftwerk, and early Parquet Courts. The second EP deserves that and more. It is a crisp album that shows an even greater range for the band, despite its brevity.

In the four songs on the new album, Marbled Eye is more restrained with the fuzz that permeated the first, leaving other devices to burrow their way into our brains. After “Former” comes “Dirt,” a comparatively sparse song with a bouncy bass that recalls Of Montreal and a catchy guitar riff that remains in your head for hours. The band’s signature monotone vocals return, but at a higher register and with greater gestures towards openness. But for every buoyant move, there’s another that grinds more aggressively; they punctuate each catchy guitar riff with another comprised of dense dissonance, and guitar feedback continues to ring in the background. Though “Feast” contains thicker layers of fuzz, its rhythmic repetitions and clearcut chorus lend the song a clean, deliberate feeling, and on “Objects,” precise, meandering guitar lines push against the steady beat of droning vocals.

Throughout the EP, those vocals are hypnotic. Expressionless and unwavering, they not only invoke the post-punk style of Total Control, but also the more chant-like form of spoken word poetry. Often, the vocals in Marbled Eye’s music gets swallowed by other instrumental voices, and they form a kind of wordless rhythm. When the lyrics do take shape, though, they are delightfully enigmatic and urgent—frequently conveying odd images and always in the present. There’s “Hanging up a dirty mirror / Walking on a hollow leg” in “Objects”; “This is what I require / This is what I desire” in “Feast”;  and a “hundred-day-old wilting flower” in “Former.”

Part of the pleasure of listening to Marbled Eye is that even when it’s impossible to decipher exactly what is happening and why, the images, rhythms, and sounds tunnel down into the mind and stay there. Their new EP grabs the listener from the first note of ringing feedback and doesn’t let go until the last guitar abruptly extinguishes.

REVIEW: the spirit of the beehive - pleasure suck

Laura Kerry

The much-anticipated second full-length of indie rockers The Spirit of the Beehive begins with a cinematic flurry of violin notes. Then “Pleasure Suck I” launches into a dense and catchy garage-rock part with bells to give it a pop brightness. Then, after moments of dissonance and fuzz, it lets loose a slow, echoing refrain, “Pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” before dissolving into a muffled, shuffling sound effect. This is the disorienting manner in which all of Pleasure Suck progresses, with pop following alternative following abstracted, indecipherable space noise. At one point in listening to the album, a transition hit so abruptly that it caused me to jump. (Spoiler: Beware of “Twenty First Road Trip.”)

The Philadelphia-based band creates perplexing and surprising music, but the most interesting surprise is the way that that music manages to hang together so coherently. Pleasure Suck is a patchwork of different textures, styles, and sounds, but the gestalt is—to (perhaps unwisely) continue with the metaphor—a quilt of sometimes-warm, sometimes-jagged psych-rock that jangles as much as it jolts.

In “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’),” for example, a succession of dissonant intervals in the voice and distorted guitar give way to a catchy chorus: “You don’t need an education ... It’s only in your mind.” The Spirit of the Beehive picks up this slacker strain again throughout the album, including in “Cops Come Looking,” in which they sing, “I’m stoned again / I don’t know you / Think I’m searching,” in a clean but hazy style that sounds like Real Estate after smoking all day on a worn-down porch. “Mono Light Crash,” a spoken story about a Texan arriving at Logan Airport in Boston without his luggage, gels into a rhythmic, guitar-driven pop song accented by disembodied, sampled voices. In “Becomes the Truth,” concentrated noise punctuated by screechy feedback follows a suspenseful drone into a spacious pop track that declares, nonchalantly but convincingly, “No one tell me what to do.”

That relaxed defiance carries through much of Pleasure Suck, but at its core, the album is anything but relaxed. As they reveal in each shift, build, and explosion, The Spirit of the Beehive make meticulous music. Their fuzz isn’t just an effect, but a layered substance comprised of multiple guitars, synths, and voices in just the right mixture; their tone isn’t just nervousness, but a tension created between dissonance and breezy pop; and their abrupt changes aren’t just tricks, but calculated movements designed to tug us in deliberate directions. Or maybe not. Maybe The Spirit of the Beehive is just fucking with us after all. Whatever their angle, though, it’s working.

PREMIERE: Haste - Annabelle

Kelly Kirwan

Haste has been simmering for the past few years, a band of Portland natives and transplants that have navigated the city’s pockets of punk and house (in their various heydays) to stitch a signature sound together. Led by vocalist and guitarist Jasmine Wood, Haste has re-emerged as a three-piece outfit that's found a new niche in shoegaze, as evidenced by their latest single, "Annabelle."

The song is a blend of long, lingering guitar strokes that unfold in languid stretched, as if in ironic contradiction to the band's very name. Wood’s deep, full-bodied pitch melts into the chords, her tone that of an unfazed observer, the sparse lyrics lost in an elongated murmur. It’s a sidestep from Wood’s previous ventures, in which her voice played a more prominent role. On "Annabelle," steadfast percussion paired with the tangy pitch from a drawn-out guitar note is king, a delay pedal it’s queen.

Overall, "Annabelle" is a subdued sort of grunge. Haste gives their melodies a touch of grit but bypass the acerbic aftertaste, instilling a sense of calm even as the instruments veer into fuzzy reverb. The track seesaws between the stormy and the serene, subtly shifting in tone and pace but maintaining a natural progression. Wood’s voice at times has the soothing, almost inaudible quality of a prolonged exhale, even as the backing instruments skitter to high decibels. And as listeners, we stay the course amid the crinkling and far-reaching notes, awash in Haste’s blur.

Haste has teamed with Track & Field records for the album release, a tape label based in Portland, Or. Track & Field will be releasing "Annabelle" on limited cassette tape in November.

REVIEW: IAN SWEET - Shapeshifter

Laura Kerry

The tale of Jillian Medford’s band unfolds like a classic love story: Girl is alone (playing guitar and singing on stage); girl meets boy (bassist); then, well, girl meets another boy (drummer); and the rest is history. When Medford, who played under the name IAN, met bassist Damien Scalise and drummer Tim Cheney, they happened upon an incredible chemistry, added “SWEET” to their title, and created the scuzzy rock band that a growing audience has come to know as IAN SWEET.

On their debut, Shapeshifter, IAN SWEET’s chemistry leads them through effortless-seeming fuzzy guitars, lo-fi drones, and vocals that punctuate the haze with yelps and cries. Underneath the fuzz, though, exist deceptively complex songs. Both Medford and Scalise have academic musical training, and their considered approach shows in songs such as “Cactus Couch,” in its wild, shifting meters, and “All Skaters Go to Heaven,” in its playful take on a ‘50s rock song. Scuzzy on the outside, Shapeshifter is comprised of sharp interactions between parts, with vocals, guitar, bass, and drums weaving together energetically. This clever intertwining guides much of the album, but comes out most strikingly on IAN SWEET’s single, “Slime Time Live,” whose vibrant melody and guitar riff might distract you from the real standout on the song: the stellar wandering bass line that propels the track forward.

All of that fuzz and compositional bliss also might distract from the album’s strong and deliberate message—but it doesn’t take that close of a listen for Medford’s emotional directness to break through. Even amid the fuzz and occasional noise, IAN SWEET maintains the singer-songwriter core of its origins, and the band wields it to create a powerful, coherent story about the impulse to lose oneself in service of a relationship (or, as the title refers to, shape-shifting for love). Letting her voice croon, rasp, break, and squeak, Medford threads her way through vulnerable self-reflection. Sometimes that leads to sad, lonely moments, such as the start of “Knife Knowing You,” when she sings in a near-whisper, “I’m stilling hiding in corners”; sometimes it is challenging (“You’re laughing / Do you find this funny?” she sings on “2soft2chew”); and sometimes it starts tender and gets intense, as on “All Skaters Go to Heaven,” which begins with the loving act of eating ice cream in bed and travels to the startlingly unnerving observation, “That’s a little exciting / To die by your side.”

The singer-songwriter format—singer alone on stage with guitar—is considered the milieu of emotional vulnerability, but IAN SWEET, with their cranked-up distortion in tow, make themselves comfortable in that space. Pairing smart and energetic scuzzy rock with heartbreakingly forthright lyrics and expressively raspy vocals on Shapeshifter, the trio proves that there’s a magnetic strength and confidence to kind of vulnerability.