2025 edition - cassette
The very first outing from our beloved Able Noise now back in print! If you missed this one first time around, correct that now. Even five years on from its initial release, what George Knegtel and Alex Andropoulos make from a very basic palette of guitar, drums and two intersecting, manipulated voices is still ostensibly new sounding. At their core, the songs themselves appear to be gentle and unimposing lullabies that are quite obviously melodically orientated, yet there's something remarkably transformative about the way the pair have chosen to process the tracks in post production, lending them a glistening, quicksilver quality. I was first reminded of Tara Clerkin Trio in the accidental-jazz elements of the opening few minutes, though repeated listens have steered me in other directions, at times recalling the ghostly avant folkisms of Diane Cluck or White Magic, and at others some of the droning, introverted aspects of slowcore (Secret Name, perhaps?). As we now know, those initial feelings are absolutely not right at all, instead the collaged sounds and eerie layering generating something intangibly other, full-songs fractured into mosaic patterned multi-songs, or else boiled down to gloopy syrup in ways that are really just, well, them! This is at once both very beautiful and cerebral music, happy to waltz down odd paths, more in the service of mood than song, but never losing its way or sense of self. Half a decade on, it now sounds like a classic debut. You were warned then and you're warned just the same now: do not miss.
