5 out of 5

Label: Matador

Produced by: Greg Talenfeld

God bless this skronky mess.

For once, I’ll spare you the autobiographical details, but when it all began, Matador Records was defined by Lonesome Crowded West-era Modest Mouse and Lynnfield Pioneers.  Indie music was awesome! I thought, and it seems that popular opinion and I would get along with our atonal wiggy-wonk music jamz.  Spoiler: Matadar Records certainly had its share of outre bands, but they were the minority.  Double spoiler, although with my musical scope expanded its satisfying to know this: Few groups have the delicately destroyed blend of noise and pop (without the slop of, say, Truman’s Water) that LP got up to back in the day, although IfIHadAHiFi are a good, punky approximation.

And there were records besides Emerge, but this is the pinnacle: A fuckton slab of feedback that gives way to Greg Talenfeld’s most primal “pump up the beat” sensibilities – a years’ forerunner to the template Walkmen abandoned on their Talenfeld-produced debut EP – and guitar and keyboard chords built out of notes that certainly don’t go together, while Dan Cook “raps” atop in a Licensed to I’ll sneer, minus the dumb fronted ‘tude.

It’s glorious.  It’s noisy and fuzzy as Hell, and no one in their right mind thinks it sounds good but it sounds goddamned great.  Is that some weird inverted Nirvana riff on Not For Long?  Is Cool Calm Serene actually soothing despite all the cacophony?  Who the hell knows?  I know that those shimmering and shaking drum fills and spastic keys make me want to dance in a run-into-walls way (this might be my normal dance).

Okay, maybe I considered docking a star for ending the disc on the tossed off Louis III after the fantastically outer-space oddity of Lucite, but thank god for repeat mode hitting me with that wall of sound again and setting me straight.