Rat Henry - Material Pop Volume One

MUCH NEEDED RESTOCK! Quite possibly the best one yet from Minimum Table Stacks with this highly stylish collection of absolutely and totally New York slop and roll by Ray Zarnowitz's Rat Henry project. A couple of self-released cassettes notwithstanding, this is quite the debut and honestly, the kind of music I thought NYC had given up on once the avo toast hit 30 bucks a slice. The whole punk persona as lifestyle art statement is in full effect throughout, Zarnowitz completely inhabiting the character he's created. Given the locale and speak-sing delivery, you're not gonna travel too hard without hearing the words 'Lou' and 'Reed', but Zarnowitz does it with genuine zeal and a heavy propensity for odd-shapes and left-turns, where compelling jangle-pop nuggets brush shoulders with short electronic drones and ambient passages, the exact sweet-spot where Siltbreeze hits Flying Nun. Which I suppose equals Peter Gutteridge's Pure in all its first-thought/best-thought scattershot glory, and there's more than a heavy dose of that very V-3 ability to somehow converge 37 ideas into one Pollocked-to-death drip technique whole. New York is dead; long live New York, and this is its latest gesamtkunstwerk. The 1976 sound of the summer of 2024 is here!