#383 Wu Lyf - Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

Brit rec'd!

I don't have time to write out whole words! I'm a busy guy!

This is kind of a gorgeous slice of something. There's a magical, ominous quality about the arrival of the first notes, with the drums, organs, bass, all interlocked and separate, flying in formation. It lies halfway between the classic Broken Social Scene unfoldenating openers and Wolf Parades melodic modest mousisms, bursting and bursting with careening energy, and then falling off a cliff to silence suddenly, gone and gone.

The rest of the album follows that latter reference point pretty closely, with Wolf Parade's shredded throat shouting, chiming guitars, and infectious desperation. But it's something more than that. There's something much more live about this, something of Man Man's manic grasping, early Animal Collective's wildman pulse, of tones unheard. It sounds a bit like Fielding would sound if Fielding was the opposite of Fielding; its possible that even the people who would get my usual watery domestic indie Fielding reference don't know what I'm talking about this time, but onward and onward, in the Wu Lyf spirit, onward.

Part of it is that the production is just unbelievable. It doesn't sound particularly overproduced, with all these ragged edges and overblown angles and the frailness in the details (holy shit the stick taps on Dirt), but has a perfect, looming dominant hugeness that cannot be achieved on accident. It's that bass too, that taps into something in my teen years that I can't place that and breaks my shit.

I feel like this needs more time. There's something universal and important in this that I can't put my finger on, and that's a rare feeling for a music listener as jaded as myself 4.5/5

You might like this if: you like indie with a frantic edge, and are willing to trade simplicity of hook for mystery.