So Spotify has a nasty habit of putting the reissue date as the release date on albums - and when I thought this was from 2016, it really threw me. It was so 90's, but so...different. The fact it's actually from the 90's makes it a little easier to deal with, but it's still a hidden gem, a total classic.
It's an album packed with offkilter tunings, startstops and subtle swerves, turning you off to turn you on -- whether that's by design of an artifact of the barebones recording? That recording, all the liveness of vintage Guided By Voices, those yelps and hitches and lofi buzzes, maybe a dasha Zappa? When your starting point's itself an erratic array, well, good luck.
Guitars rumble up, hitch, hook, simmer, zig when counted to zag, etc. It's an album I struggled to review - at first repelantly half-off, uncannily detuned, but...something. Scheherazade holding on long enough to catch my ear with its abstract argument, an album you felt exhausted by at track 3, and ready for a hundred more by track 13. An unknowable thing, a daringly, subtly inscrutable screed of guitar noise and plaintive yelping, Pavement cousins once removed and close enough for kissing, battering its influences, if any, into unrecognition --- a move worth all of your attention. Reeling still, can't tell if I like it or love it, points for keeping me wondering, hours and hours on -- candidate for one of the top albums of the decade, whichever its really from, if I can ever pull apart its straightout knots. These guys might be fucking geniuses. I can't even tell 4.5/5
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