Okay, so I kind-of lied to you in my big “return post” on Monday. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a big lie. But I realized after the fact that I’d actually listened to music in my homie DJ 12XU’s car in addition to the limited amount of stuff I’d heard in Emeyesi’s. I guess I’d forgotten all about that until I happened to pick up a copy of one of the records he’d been particularly excited about this week.
That record is Boss, the newest full-length from Hartford, Connecticut-based Noise-Rock duo Magik Markers. I got my first taste of Boss while speeding up I-91 one night on the way to peep Superbad when 12XU put it on and asked what I thought. He voiced concerns that longtime fans of the band, known for abrasive sonic textures and, shall we say, “non-traditional” stage-antics, might find the album off-putting since it features more fleshed-out songs (most notably album opener “Axis Mundi” and the piano-ballad “Empty Bottles”) with relatively linear lyrics and (egad!) actual melodies that sometimes sound (heaven forfend!) pretty! Although I don’t have a problem with dissonant “noise” freak-outs per-se, I’m admittedly a bigger fan of lyrics, melody and “pretty” songs, so I didn’t mind what I heard at all. But being intimately familiar with the ways of “the hater” I could easily see how the duo might be in for some shit from some of their fans. Fans and newbies alike will have to wait until next Tuesday, when Boss drops on local fixture (and Noise-Rock icon) Thurston Moore’s Easthampton-based indie label Ecstatic Peace!, to make up their minds about it though.
Listen to “Empty Bottles”
Though they make a radically different form of music, Brooklyn-based trio Mobius Band is another act with local ties (they used to make their home in nearby Shutesbury, and cut their teeth gigging around the region) whose newest release, Heaven, is something of a departure from the sound that first brought them to prominence as well. When I first discovered the band via MP3.com (remember that?) early in the decade they impressed me with their uniquely progressive Alternative Rock soundscapes built around samples, raw drum breaks, synthesizers, drum machines and odd loops which put them in a class of artists which includes Radiohead, Tortoise, Subtle, and Fourtet. Since signing with stalwart Electronica label Ghostly International they’ve gone through a metamorphosis of sorts which sees them emerging here as even more of an Interpol-esque Post-Punk unit with a ringing and buzzing wall of fuzzy electric guitars, jumpy drums, and nasally phone-line vocals joining their arsenal of synths and effects. It works just fine, but it sure is an interesting, and surprising, evolution that the group’s gone through. One that I never would have imagined when I was head-nodding away to the likes of “Taxicab” and “The Lights are Always On.”
Listen to “A Hint of Blood”
In closing, since 12XU might be reading this, I have to say “Alex Smoke,” and “echo dub effects,” even though those phrases have absolutely nothing to do with either of these bands.
-El Keter
