The Last Barbarians - Take It Back [EP]

The Last Barbarians - Take It Back [EP]
2010, The Last Barbarians

Philadelphia's The Last Barbarians are preparing to take over your mind. Their Take It Back EP sets the stage for the band's next plan for conquest, release a series of free singles throughout 2010 to allow them to perfect songs at their own pace while touring and partying. Mixing metal and groove-filled rock with a nonchalant air, The Last Barbarians have built a buzz between Philadelphia and New York City that's found them playing venues such as The Khyber and The Annex.

Take It Back opens with the speed punk/funk number "Slave Dog", a rocker so frenetically dance-oriented you might literally dance your head off. Bass player gets a workout that would make Jillian Michaels shake her head in wonder as The Last Barbarians rocket through this song. The other song on Take It Back is "The Curse", built around an anachronistic guitar riff that sounds like a cross between The Butthole Surfers and Iron Maiden. The sound here isn't pretty, but pretty isn't the intent. The Last Barbarians intend to melt your face while you slam to the funk. They succeed on all accounts.

Rating: 3 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more about The Last Barbarians at http://www.thelastbarbarians.com/ or www.myspace.com/thelastbarbarians. Take It Back is a free two-song single available through The Last Barbarians' web store. Be sure to check out their other releases while you're there.

Review: Susurrus Station - Add A Day Going West

Susurrus Station - Add A Day Going West
2009, Susurrus Station

J Breeden and Sara Dyberg are the emotional and physical core of Susurrus Station, reaching out of Portland, Oregon with whisper rather than a scream. Multi-instrumentalists and vocalist, both, Breeden and Dyberg mix styles and sounds in unusual and surprising ways to create some of the edgiest and darkness Avant-Folk in the business today. As Susurrus Station, Breeden and Dyberg have released two albums, and step forward with their third, Add A Day Going West, on November 10, 2009. Folk, Garage Rock, Industrial, Cinematic compositional styles and a dark countenance make up the heart of Susurrus Station's music. Unlike past albums, Susurrus Station was recorded over the course of a year (rather than in a rampant frenzy of creation and recording). The building of songs was deliberate and intentional, and it shows on the album.

Add A Day Going West opens with Driven, a song which seems written in contradiction to its title. Breeden sounds like Jim Morrison on serious downers here, giving a somnolent, drugged sounding vocal reading that's inured in Smiths-like pathos. Musically it's more a collection of sounds and musical passages than a composition, right down to the heavy rock portion that kicks in around 4:15. Midway Shuffle shows an energetic, neo-surf guitar opening that descends into the hypnotic depressive state of the first tune. Sara Dyberg takes over vocals on The Bellwether Din; a fuzzy trance-like performance where they key shifts and things like tone don't seem to matter. The song ranges over four-and-a-quarter minutes but at times seems like it will just keep going.

Barnstorm takes on a Middle Eastern flavor in a song about yearning for "The One" to come along. The style and arrangement are highly moveable, even interposing a "Beatles in a funhouse" passage at the end. b reminds me of a band like The Butthole Surfers trying to cover one of Pink Floyd's more spacey instrumentals; Susurrus Station descends into an absolute chaos of noise that essentially chokes any musicality out. The album closes out with Talking With The Wind and Long Tomorrow, leaning more heavily into the hopeful ether of overly-affected Folk/Rock. The end result is an album that decreases in listenability throughout its course even as it rakes in the pathos.

Add A Day Going West will find folks into this sort of thing, but they're not your typical music fans. Anything that sounds almost wholly unhinged from reality and ethereal at the same time is bound to garner some attention. Susurrus Station attempts to bridge the gap between listenability and discomfort and fails in significant portion. Add A Day Going West takes a high constitution. Make sure you have yours handy.

Rating: 1.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Susurrus Station at http://www.susurrusstation.com/ or www.myspace.com/susurrusstation. Add A Day Going West goes public on November 10, 2009. Keep checking the band’s website for availability information.

Review: Smile Case - Lose Our Heads

Smile Case - Lose Our Heads

2009, Blacktop Records

Ben Andress is not a coward. He ventures forth as a tone deaf singer/songwriter with a sense for good hooks and near-stream of consciousness songwriting. He's also the driving force behind Smile Case, an artist collective of one mind and multiple personas. The Canadian singer/songwriter/Pickle Pizza eater set forth with his debut album in July of 2009 called Lose Our Heads. The album was released by Andress' own Blacktop Records in Canada, and features some of the most fractured songwriting of the year, to date.

Lose Our Heads, the title track, is a diatribe about living for the weekend and plays like an imbalance co-worker revealing the unfortunate and un-hearable aspects of his social life. Up next is Motivational Speaker, a take on bravery with low expectations. There's actually a message about being yourself no matter what that is in there somewhere, but you might miss it in a composition that runs well under two minutes. Waking Up To Sunshine sounds vaguely like two bands practicing in adjacent rehearsal spaces and essentially repeats the same lyric for the full nearly-two minutes of the song. In Some Other City clocks in at a robust four minutes sounding once again like there are two distinct tracks playing at once. The guitar and voices sound like they might have been recorded in someone's bathroom, while the come-and-go strings (synth) sounds like it was done in a studio. The two are merged together in a surreal fashion but never really sound together. The vocal/guitar portion of the recording is pure Lo-Fi and includes what sounds like mistakes such as forgotten lyrics and missed queues at times.

Take Good Care My Brother And Sisters opens with a voice part from Jon Favreau's Swingers and seems to be about a game of chance over someone's sister before it devolves into an unintelligible storm of notes and garbled lyrics. 50 Below Zero is the sort of declaration almost anyone would make in such conditions set to music. Kim Kelly is simply unlistenable. Nothing is in tune, no one really sings/plays together and the words border on unintelligible at times. Life Of A Party opens with a snippet from Chasing Amy, easily the most understandable part of the song. Three Generations shows signs of wanting to be lucid but devolves as soon as Andress opens his mouth to sing. Andress is even more difficult to understand than The Gangsta Rabbi, Steve Lieberman. Lose Our Heads closes with The Art Of Losing Your Head, which opens with a line from Girl, Interrupted that is probably the most apropos statement on the entire disc.

Smile Case is a seriously demented musical project that borders on performance art. The presentation of insanity enclosed in Lose Our Heads is either a frightful diorama of madness or an attempt at a Jackass style send-up of insanity. Either way it's not a terribly pleasant listen. I sat through it for the purpose of giving it a fair listen but wouldn't choose to do so again. I don't have a strong opinion on whether it's good or bad, it's just so far off the chart there's not a lot to compare it to. Some who are more into the realm of musical masochism will definitely find this a treat. If you think Phoebe Buffay should have had a child with Gibby Haynes and taught him to play guitar and sing, then this would be your reward.

Rating: 1.5 Star (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Smile Case at www.myspace.com/smilecase, where you can purchase a copy of Lose Your Head directly from the artist.