Hey folks. We here at WaveWave can’t tell you how excited we are to launch our site with an album review of seminal newcomer Long Island pre-industrial punk-post band Lady Carnival. This group has been building a ton of buzz, and rightly so. Their new EP Fingerfake is a patchwork of beauty and maximalism that stands out as one of the absolute best releases of the last 14 weeks.
On first listen, one might ignore the subtler tendencies of this album – its Nietzschean overtones are present but unobtrusive. But after a few spins, the full magnitude of this sonic mosaic is apparent; this is not your standard bedroom-drone. While to their detractors Lady Carnival has been labelled as a “rich man’s electro-funk outfit,” Fingerfake makes it difficult to argue with the directions and intentions that herein speak so saliently. Vocalist Estella Mitchell makes this clear when, over the quiet yet comfortable ambience-turned-hiss-cloud guitar lashes of the opening track she croons, ” You felt like me once / I’ll steal you in months. ” Giving a nod to punk-post figureheads The Trucks, this duo-trio has certainly done their homework. From the elegant bump of Lethal Label to the more intricate and compressed hints of 80s noise-dub band YOUTHANIZE, Lady Carnival’s influences are hot-glued together in a deceptively timid yet unfettered statement of originality.
The most apparent difference one notices between Fingerfake and the band’s debut, Welcome Back to my Cabin Again for the First Time, is the striking absence of left-fi portraitism and the eminence and leanings toward wave-wave underpinnings. Although jarring, the change is welcomed. And whileWBTMCAFTFT certainly had its time, place, and audience, Lady Carnival has smartly angled its sounds towards a more refined and existentially apt statement. The production quality on Fingerfake, to be sure, is cleaner, crisper, and more cotton-like. As an unabashedly elegant answer to the group’s debut, this EP shines. Mitchell’s breathy and hearty utterances soar over the bitter-but-swollen guitar work of keyboardist Eric Quiggers. And on the albums third track, “14 Minutes…Please,” the light play between the two explodes into an nu-noise romp that makes you feel like you're listening to early 70′s era Hardhat.
I think my readers will agree that retail-oriented drum tracking has never been a strong suit for Lady Carnival (or any pre-industrial ensemble for that matter), but this flaw becomes a defining attribute of the EP. Take the final track, “MMMouth/////////Leather”, for example. The beats that sound for the first 2 minutes of this glow-pop mammoth die and resurrect over 8 times, but the overall effect is mesmerizing. One gets drawn in to the light production values of long time LF contributor Mitch Mose (of Jackrappers and Fountain Wars fame). And listeners might be surprised to know that bassist Tim Pouter has stated in interviews that “yeah even though ["MMMouth/////////Leather"] was recorded on an old analog 3-track in my attic, it was originally meant to be the first track of the album.” The subsequent alterations made to these early album plans leave us with a captivating statement of unanswered certainties and insipid cruelties.
A brief look at the contention of the sub-indie punk-post world over the past 4 years show just how fragmented this genre is. The single unanswerable question that every band, blogger, and critic has lost sleep over is, ‘How can trans-guitar dominance, drawn from a palette of sonic variety and Hegelian insubordination coexist with discordant-but-soft vocal swells?” I think its safe to say that with Lady Carnival’s Fingerfake, this question has been answered.
Rating = Y
No comments:
Post a Comment