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.