Albums

Album Review: Singer

Album: Unhistories
Label: Drag City

Chicago quartet Singer’s debut album, ‘Unhistories’, is a buzzed-out art-rock pool of warming tones hitting sudden brick-wall silences. Its carefully filtered and down-tuned lead guitar parts pitch violently against blocks of stuttering rhythm. It’s a jarring, psychedelic trip with a strained, buzzed-out series of vocals as your only guide. The band appear to have taken all their ideas for what should go in the album, put them all in a hat, and randomly picked a running order for each track out. It’s a bizarre lucky dip of sounds that come at you from the most oblique of angles, yet each snippet appears to have no connection with the one that precedes it.

If this is a deliberate break from traditional song composition as means of making a particular statement then I’ve missed the point they were aiming for. There are no clues in the bland moniker the band have adopted, no hint from the album packaging (just four lost souls peering solemnly through windows), and even the song titles or lyrics fail to throw light on the matter.

When something as impenetrable as this is presented then you pray for a chink in the armour and it’s not until ‘Mauvais Sang’, the final track, that I find myself anything other than completely lost. With the whispering buzz of fingered guitar, maniacal vocal promptings and steady, splintering drums I finally find my happy place listening to the slow ekeing out of a sharply, intricate rhythm that shows their really is something here worthy of closer inspection. As for the remainder of the album, well it’s not exactly easy-going. May I suggest you play this at an excessive volume with all the windows open as I reckon you could get a pretty decent reaction from next-door’s canine.

For fans of: Pink Floyd, Stunt Rock, Sun Kil Moon
Band links = Singer

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Tags: album, cd, singer, unhistories, review, drag city, pink floyd, sun kil moon, art rock

John’s review also appears in TLOBF.

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