Silver Sleeve 2015
World coming unhinged results in a rude revitalization of Brooklyn’s sharp-edged observers of consumerist’s sins.
Long neck provides for a good vantage point, and this quartet, exposing many a detail of a current situation, have been on an agitation spree since 2006. The return of singer Aaron Lazar after a 3-year leave seems to have refilled their bite with bile to make “Usury” pack a powerful punch in less than 30 minutes, the album’s only sweet release being the flamenco-tinctured “White Jacket” which, one suspects, isn’t strictly about a mariner’s uniform but also about vest of a mental ward kind. Cue the restraint and fury of Damien Paris’ riffs in the rushed likes of “Facebook Rant” where the modern monetary politics are addressed with a good pinch of sarcasm.
And it cuts deep – there’s not just surface tension in “Blood Will Run” whose resigned menace plumbs the unhurried, heavy despair with a cinematic judder, ragged if arresting, while “Washing Machine” is brimful of anger, although the piece’s angularity gets dissolved in its harmonic chant: that’s how revolutions begin. Yet the epic drama of “How It Happened To Me” throws doubt onto the fire to question one’s riotous motifs, and it’s here that all the melodious subtleties of the group’s approach get exposed. That’s the advantages of a vantage point – to be above the fuss. A welcome resurrection of power.
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