Copiers
This one snuck out in November but the shock waves reverberate long after release and on into the New Year. The Louisville band’s sound is terse and tensile, rolling post-punk, No Wave, and jazz into the gravel pile and picking up its fair share of roughage on the way. From the onset of “Haircut Severity,” (points for the excellent opening title there) the band is on edge and feeling ready to splinter to bits at any moment, though unlike some of their peers the band knows how to strike a balance. After the rage sweat of the opener evaporates the band settles into a cosmic calm — pinging subtle streaks of serenity around the ambient headspace, though seemingly bouncing on their toes all the while.
Following the almost 12-minute second track, the band is back into the wood chipper, looking to chew metal girders into shank-filed chords. They add a dose of half-hallucinated organ to the mix, before wrestling the vortex and succumbing once more to the dark recesses of their psychedelic jazz odyssey. The record is full of jagged edges that endear it to a long lineage of Midwest marauders, feeling as at home in their Louisville pocket as they would in Cleveland, Columbus, or Bloomington and burrowing deeper into the rust-belt grit. The band’s debut feels like it boasts good things on the horizon from this outfit.
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