Best of 2020
Second record in around 12 months from the Glasgow trio who favour an especially distinct form of art-school obtuseness that's got me grabbing for a whole slew of references, none of which seem to be fully on the money. If you've heard their last record on Bison (Long Play), you'll know the band for riding roughshod over structure, and here they again hit that same sweet spot of scrappy formless melodicism channeled by early Micachu and the Shapes. Yknow, the kind of music that suggests it's makers have spent a lot of time studying how to unstudy. Messthetics with an avant garde eye. For me, there's also some kind of debt to the abrasion of mid 90s lo-fi (maybe it's the way their cut 'n' paste methods emulate tape spliced home recordings?), and dare i say it, the off-beat jazz guitar abstractions of Faraquet, Hella, Owls, even... Shellac? Not sure that's what they're gunning for, but it rips that same way. What pushes this into a category all its own is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach's vocal, which remains the defining element throughout, flitting between seemingly off-tangent ad libs and strangely birthed primal confessionals. Her tone is incredibly unique, both intimately soulful and abrasively punk in its give-a-fuck singularness, somehow shifting in shape over each record (listen to those early tapes b2b with this record - quite the evolution). Killer record all told, and one of the best to come from these isles in some time.
