Black Eyes

Sometimes there’s just a band that skates by like a missed connection. In ’03/’04 there were a lot of loose ends coming together, laying a lot of the noise, folk, and indie boundaries for RSTB to bloom just a couple of years later. Yet, my headspace was not in the same sphere as Black Eyes, and they remained a blindspot for some time. It’s funny, because Mi Ami made a pretty hard imprint as they rose, and other orbiting outfits like Sex Worker, Expensive Shit, and naturally, Kanin’s work with Water Damage would hit just right. It’s been a couple decades of downtime for the band, but with new work from the reformed ranks back on the speakers, 2025 feels like just the right time to lay into Black Eyes.

We’re clearly slipping unassisted through the darkness and delirium of some backwards bile duct. What better time than the warped, wax-melted reality of 2025 to embrace the band’s jilted jackhammer choruses, their time-wobbled dub, or the post-societal pound of their rhythms? Hostile Embrace is packed with the kind of future classics built to blast from broken speakers, to be repeated in call and response across the flat-pack wasteland. Dystopian desperation has never let the nerves get so raw, or channeled such a balanced mix of anger and anxiety. Frankly it’s never been this scorched by sax. The brew’s just right, a hallucinatory froth that mirrors the ‘from all sides’ attack of daily life halfway through the rotgut of the ‘20s. Black Eyes seem to understand that the only reasonable recourse is to spit acid and crush riffs into dodecahedral shapes. Perhaps the demons of the early aughts just weren’t potent enough for me to latch onto Black Eyes, but these days, it seems crazy not to hold Hostile Embrace up as a bouquet of generational anthem.

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