5 out of 5

Producer by: Jason Ward

Label: Insidious Plot Audio

On a one-off label with a fairly cheap looking cover and a (deceptively) flat recording style, I’d picked up The Feud as a group that was thanked by a few other bands that I liked, gave it a spin, and filed it into the “cool instrumental rock” category, which I was very much in to at the time.  Yeah, that’s Jason Ward on there, and he’d worked with those bands who’d thanked The Feud, so we’ll sub-file it in the “cool producer” category.  Pretty cool.

There are some albums you “wake up” to – you put it on in the right situation and suddenly you hear things you never heard before, and they’re amazing.  But that wasn’t Language is Technology.  I felt like it was a pretty straightforward disc initially, but elements, snippets, would get stuck in my head, and “straightforward” also meant it was easy to listen to, so I’d put it on to cure the snippet-stucking and then let it play out.  And repeat.  Eventually, you realize that they’re no longer snippets, but rather whole songs, and the entire album is committed to memory.

The mixing is what makes it sound flat, because all of the instruments are given ample room and the group’s song construction works in the same way, but the recording, on the whole, is anything but.  Fuzz, horns, shouts, keys, ebb and flow.  There’s so much packed on to the disc, and yet it seems brisk and lightweight at 50 minutes.  The group never seems to showboat, which is also what initially makes it seem mundane, but the payoff is that the entire experience – literally first note to last – steps up its game to become more important.

There are musical touchpoints that the Allmusic review pretty much nails – some spacey Mogwai stuff, some Fucking Champs rockout, some Godspeed! freakout – but The Feud mushes it all together into this morphing wave of anthemic, grooving rock blasts, relaxedly knocking it out like the crazy-ass time signatures and tonal changes ain’t no thang.

And even despite my knowing the disc is all sorts of great, I still know it doesn’t have that “you’ve got to listen to this” grabability.  Which apparently sucked for the group’s longevity, but makes me wish, in the long run, that I had more albums like this.