The Serious Geniuses
You Can Steal the Riffs, But You Can’t Steal the Talent Yes, what you read above the paragraph is the title of the new Serious Geniuses album. Yes, what you just read means that the name of the band is the Serious Geniuses. Once you’re through shaking your head, come back to the review. Looking down at this new disc made me laugh and cringe. It either has to be the best thing I’ve heard in a while or the dumbest thing. Amazingly, the songs were neither great nor terrible and sustained my interest and made me forget the unbelievable artwork (a giant monster being driven by a man in his brain to puke out the band’s name, some garbage, and a sailing ship). The Geniuses are a sort dense listen. You want to grab an influence here or a reference there, but the music kind of eludes total precise comparison. This is not to say the band artistically avoids comparison through adept skill and inventiveness. No, one can easily say, “This sounds like Piebald or Superchunk,” and nobody in the room would be confused. If you remember If It Weren’t For Venetian Blinds or On the Mouth from those respective bands, including the sort of lo-fi rock sound they both had, the Serious Geniuses are lurking somewhere in that territory. What would separate the Geniuses from either of those bands is the lack of memorable songs. And maybe that’s due to the vocals. I’ve heard from a couple people now that “the music’s tolerable, but the vocals kill it for me.” The whiny, almost nasal quality is a deterrent. However, the song structures and instrumentation are worthy of qualifying as a combative force to the poor melodies and delivery. Take opener “Tour Ture,” which would probably be a straight forward rocker live but sounds a little tame on record. When the vocals aren’t getting in the way, the song is actually so reminiscent of Archers of Loaf or Superchunk that the listener will probably be enticed to ride the album a little longer. The effect wears off after a while, and you’ll probably be looking for an album by the bands who influenced the Geniuses rather than sticking around for too long. But for those who do stick around might be surprised that there’s a band out there playing this type of indie rock anymore. It’s clear that the Geniuses have paid attention to more than what’s praised by blogs and Spin magazine. [Quattrocchi]
www.kissofdeathrecords.com
Static Radio NJ
An Evening of Bad Decisions Another victory for melodic hardcore. Static Radio has released their debut full-length, and the world of hardcore is better for it. In a scene where everything is judged by how close to Kid Dynamite’s sound it comes, Static Radio makes an album that stands alongside its peers and outshines most of them... without taking countless cues from KD. Hallelujah. Opener “Marc” kicks things off more like Insted than Lifetime. The production and execution on this track is remarkable. Singer Mike waxes existential about life’s problems , but the general vagueness of subject matter is made up with the vocal delivery and urgency in his voice. There is something to be said about Mike’s voice, which is startlingly promising in a field of very similar hardcore vocalists. He can sometimes convey the longing of Lifetime’s Ari Katz, while stretching to an intelligent outburst ala Greg Graffin. It might sound strange, but he gets there and back. Static Radio will most likely be looking at a wide-open road after the impact of this album hits. There are “crossover” songs such as “Places” and “Fin” that will grab a poppier crowd along the way, but there’s no concession made either. The refreshingly genuine aspect of Static Radio is that the lyrics, though they appear simple, seem to be the band’s best attempt at conveying anxiety and personal trauma. They’re not writing esoteric verses and coating their words with meaningless sentiments. This will probably have listeners greeting An Evening of Bad Decisions with an open ear, respectful of the band’s honesty. [Quattrocchi]
Stay Sharp
Strangers Die Every Day
Stay Sharp’s debut EP is released after only a year of the band being in existence. The first two songs, “Winning is Everything” and “Hatfield of Dreams,” jump out of the gate and are done in about 2:30. Singer Nick Hirschmann shouts atop a dizzying hardcore onslaught as the lyrics cover disappointment and disillusionment. Standard stuff, but the band gets two solid jams right out of the way and ushers in the real meat of the EP, “Sign It.” If you don’t catch it in the blur of the first two songs, Hirschmann possesses a register not unlike Chris’s from Propaghandi. Had Stay Sharp harnessed the chops of the mighty Propaghandi, “Sign It’ would be an audible dead ringer straight off More Rock, Less Talk. But Stay Sharp steers away from muscle riffs and keeps it straight and tight. The closer, “Charge the Mound”, is another barnburner, clocking in around 1:30. The breakdown in the last :30 is satisfying in its anthemic gang vocal: “No, this isn’t me/This isn’t who I’m supposed to be/I’m sure it’s just a phase/I’m gonna fight it(until I’m free).” Hirschmann and crew sound deadest on exorcising demons through their blistering speed and shouted vocals through this debut EP. The variation at the end of “Charge the Mound” and the entire “Sign It” show enough promise that I can see a lot of people being interested in following Stay Sharp along the way, toward their next release. [Quattrocchi]
The explosion of instrumental, heavily dynamic indie rock (or “post-rock” if you must) over the last half-decade has been well-documented. Many of the genre’s heavyweights, as with rock music as a whole, rely mostly on the guitar in one form or another. Often, it’s a whole fucking wall of them. Strangers Die Every Day aren’t the first to fit comfortably within this genre, while forgoing the guitar all together. They opt for drums, bass, violin and cello, resulting in sort of a postchamber music sound. What makes their sound stand out even more is that they give up almost none of the brooding, slow-building intensity of old Mogwai. Along the way, they also maintain the more spaced-out, uneasy feel of Godspeed or even Tortoise. Along the way, they prove that all of the aforementioned bands are much more reference points for SDED’s sound than a full summation. First, the structure of their sound really tends to lean as much toward chamber music as it does anything rock-related. But thankfully, the execution of this—especially the violin and cello parts—is way better than most of their contemporaries. As someone who was forced to play classical music for most of my formative years, I usually cringe at the sound that has passed for “cello playing” in indie rock lately. Bands like Cursive, Murder By Death, and even, to a lesser degree, Apocalyptica and Rasputina have offered up little more cello-wise than simply sawing away. The results are mixed, but the tone is almost always bad. This is partly due to rock producers attempting, with various levels of success to properly capture classical instruments. The production here does a great job of it. Even the bass and drum parts sound different from the usual, bottom-heavy, booming sound that everyone is going for. It works for Mogwai, but Strangers Die Every Day are far better off without it. The record starts off strong with “...And the Blood Shall Spill,” the longest track. It sets a thoughtful, but still energetic, even aggressive tone. The drums are prominently displayed in the mix, driving much of the song. The real winner here is “Bicycle” the next-to-last track. It opens with simple, clean and catchy cello line, quickly joined by violin and viola. It rapidly builds into a surprisingly direct, catchy rock song. The cello seems to adopt most of the melody lines throughout, essentially borrowing the role of the vocals. More than every other song here, it makes you completely forget about the odd clash of genres and instrumentation that defines the band. Instead, it pulls you all the way in to what is, by any measure, a great song on a strong debut record.
www.myspace.com/monkeywrenchrecords
A Storm of Light
And We Wept the Black Ocean Within What do you get when you add Neurosis’ visual director (and former Red Sparrowes guitarist) Josh Graham, Domenic Seita of Toms, and Pete Angevine of Satanized? A Storm of Light’s debut begins with an intro that seeps the beginning of a voyage across the ocean, “Adrift (The Albatross I)” before “Vast and Endless” tears out your soul. As noisy as we want (and expect), A Storm of Light is extremely layered with sounds of winds and oceans crashing underneath the downtrodden pulse of the song. Deep, doomy and slow, this takes the genre even further into the the deep end. Long songs allow them to create really complex atmospheres and brooding tunes. Next up, we have “Black Ocean,” another deeply doomy song, swallows you slowly and deliberately. Dual vocals make it especially haunting as the slow drone hypnotizes you. I don’t know that the word “deep” or “brooding” describe this quite well enough. Imagine the weight of the ocean on your chest, fighting your every breath with eons of vehemence. “Thunderhead” is the next storm on the horizon, capsizing what little sanity you have left with its just under eight-minute expanse. Drummer Pete Angevine sounds almost electronic in his precision execution. Haunting, “Undertow (the Albatross II)” brings a slight reprieve with pulsating sounds of rain, wind, thunder, and waves. “Mass,” starts off with an odd chime, and sounds like a last apology to the heavens for deeds left undone, good byes not said. “Leaden Tide” comes up next, as the ocean begins to pull you back under. Vocals are almost chanted, following the drone of the guitars, bass, and slow beat. This song ends leading into the last of our albatross, “Breach (The Albatross III).” As the mast creeks, you can feel the tension as the abominations of the deep start to circle. “Iron Heart” builds on the noise revealed in “Descent.” Vocals start to blur with the guitars, synth, and noise lines, until the tension breaks. The ocean finally envelops you, dragging you down to the deep in the album’s epic closer. The artwork is excellent, blurring the line between the horizon and the ocean’s surface. Overall, this is a deep, dark, brooding album, and is not for the faint of heart. Those of you who are willing to try will reap its rewards.
[Dixon]
www.neurotrecordings.com
www.theblacknumbers.com
42
Aperture For Departure
Four Songs (CDEP)
:: THE NEW SCHEME ::
[Anderson]
www.thisgenerationtapes.com
Brendan Sullivan Wooley Eyes
Maybe here is the wrong place to explore the virtues and shortcomings of releasing your music through cassette. For the tape faithful, the form is as obsolete as the collector lets it be, i.e. if you still feel that recording, releasing, and owning cassettes is vital to music, then those who disagree with you cannot prove cassettes are any less important than other types of releases. The music still comes out of speakers, it just rewinds differently. As a reviewer, I must take the form just as any other and maybe thank whatever it was that made me keep my couple of cassette players. Of course, that is if I have something interesting to play from them. Coming to you live and through the hiss of the longforgotten cassette is a collection of demos and home recordings from Brendan Sullivan. For the most part, it’s just Sullivan and his guitar, strumming away slowly and quietly “in three bedrooms and one living room residing in south Florida and Baltimore, Maryland,” as the liner notes tell me. Something this precious and sentimental to the artist is a weird challenge to the reviewer. On one hand, I want to write that putting this kind of honesty to tape (literally) and sending it to zines for review is gutsy, and for that I commend him; on the other hand, I want to write that Sullivan has had too much acoustic singersongwriter in his diet and it’s time to branch out. Rather than commanding the once-in-a-lifetime endearing quality of the mighty Daniel Johnston’s