2 out of 5

Label: Slowdime

Producer: Bill Skibbe

While produce Bill Skibbe has worked with a good blend of quiet / loud herky-jerk bands I dig, such as Call Me Lightning, his clear cut recording style helps to punch up what’s punchable on Abilene’s debut, but we essentially have a couple of legit tracks on the tail-ends of this EP, buffered by like 20 minutes of sleepy stuff inbetween.  It’s not an unpleasant sound, per se, but one that would be more solidifed on the 54’40 label followup, when Fred Erskine’s horns would pop into the mix and lead Alex Dunham would get some fuel behind his vocals.  The trick here is that those opening and closing songs are good.  It’s sort of a surreal sound that plods around a rhythm, structured but played loose – almost sleepily – and though Dunham talks through most of the words there’s a bit of edge to his presentation that makes this stuff feel subtly emotive.  The drums roll along behind jazz style, keeping the beat, and you, going.  The nature of this is such that you can let the up and down and up rhythm play for awhile without realizing it, so the middle tracks can all pass by without much thought (which is what happened when I first listened to this).  But if you look up to see what song is playing, it might feel odd to realize that it’s actually apparently been three or four songs, and Dunham actually started singing at some point and you didn’t realize it.  Then the last track kicks in, which wakes up again, and you can shrug it all off.

I listen to a lot of plodding noise, thanks to Skin Graft records, but that generally comes bundled with some kind of point – to annoy, to pummel, to experiment, or even to bore.  What’s frustrating here is that these aimless tracks feel written, feel like they’re supposed to be songs.  And that seems confirmed by the similar but sharpened songcraft that would come with Abilene’s next album, which latched on to the sort of wandering, jazzy style here and upped the hardcore influence to make it into a more dangerous and definable sound.