Labels: Shorter Recordings
Review by: james pacanowski
Second helping from this lot in a short while, and hopefully one that should start getting them more props from the masses of lo-fi pop appreciators than they are currently receiving (as from the looks of things it seems like they are not really receiving any love at all).
Anyway, at this point (for me at least) Graham Repulski are no longer a pleasant surprise as their last release showed off that they have some songwriting chops. I was not quite expecting them to sound this good though. They kick off with Warm Vibrations, which is a noisy slabs of guitar noise that is almost the polar opposite of the sunny Beach Boys vibes the title might recall; this jumps straight into the Guided By Voices-esque nugget that is Crab Feast, the nearest equivalent to Old Bay seasoning in aural form; this segues into the 18 second fastball of War & Peace, actually one of the catchiest tunes on here as brief as it may be; Hunt Them follows soon after, riding some Stooges style keys,a babbling, childlike refrain and relentless strumming that in the hands of anyone else would just be tuneless and unnecessary but here forms the backbone to the entire song; the blown-out acoustic Come On, Ancient Cloud brings the tone down after that briefly, then it’s Homunculus and it’s surfy guitars that collide with jarring noise; then back to another downbeat number in Holy Face that slowly erupts into squiggling feedback before cutting abruptly into the thumping 6ths-esque Molten Girls, Iowa; Our Big Wet World then abandons all pretense at songwriting and just fills your ears with white noise that sounds like being inside a railtrack as trains carriages run over you; Kickface is what emerges from the noise, a wordless song with a repetitive guitar line and clattering feedback; finally we get vocals again in the thick, sloppy Mind Bog that were it not buried beneath acres of delay and mumbled vocals might recall Thin Lizzy with the guitar lines; the album closes on the melancholic Miscellaneous Man Landscapes, another mumbly tune that dances out on a soft howl.
I would not really have gone into as much detail about the album if Graham Repulski were not so impossible to describe; while they do certainly fit under the ‘lo-fi pop’ tag, they don’t really resemble the bored surf tunes of the current big hitters like Real Estate or Vivian Girls. In fact, they do not really bring anyone to mind, at least not consistently. Sometimes they sound like Half Japanese minus the brass, or occasionally the upbeat, amateurish garage squall of The Shaggs, or even the pre-punk, pre-no-wave psychedelia of obscurities like Red Krayola (or those post-punk, no-wavers like Pere Ubu or This Heat). Then sometimes they just abandon all influences and break into feedbacky noise. No matter what though, it’s always fucking good. Completely recommended.