I’m glad they don’t pay me to write about music or anything.
1. This art-folk group, comprised of recent Bennington grads (including Mountain Man’s Amelia Randall Meath), are fascinated by opposites and negatives, by the sharp disparities between ambient and rhythmic, airy and earthy, restive and tranquil, male and female.
2. Their web presence is so cryptic, they make Dead Air Space look like Lil B’s Twitter feed.
3. Though Fiend Without a Face opens with a spazzy blast of guitar and some unhinged shrieking on “Calypso”, it sounds more like early Meat Puppets-meet-QOTSA than your average horn-throwing extreme act.
4. If there’s anywhere hard rock, psych-folk, and electro-glitch all share a root context, it’s in the scrapyard assemblage of an ecclectic cratedigger like Shadow.
5. The concepts that were brilliantly muddled in Greenwood’s mind– noisenik gristle, folksong, skronky improvisation– are now compartmentalized.
6. In a way, that’s been the constant in their career, and there’s often the feeling here that Battles haven’t forgotten their pre-Tyondai days, where they seemed to be applying the hyper-detailed structures of math-rock to the feel of minimal techno.
7. They also try on more styles: Where “Call to Nothing” pledges ill-fated devotion through scratchy guitar and heavy bass recalling the Slits, “Well Alright” rides a demented roadhouse blues and “My Baby” slows down to a loping love groove– for stalkers.
8. To be clear, Spaceghostpurrp will not make a game-changing appearance on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”, and outside of being another young skate kid fascinated by video games and Satan, he doesn’t have much in common with Tyler and company.
9. Their debut EP, Horse Power, concluded with a note-perfect cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, more an airtight, Pomplamoose-style layering exercise than a reimagination of that familiar tune.
10. Noir has a similar way of wringing strangely affecting emotional grandeur from the rudiments of sound, though BSBD’s style relies less on glitch or drone and more on starry-eyed orchestral vastness.
