Sometimes a song comes along that’s so fucking great you’d do anything for it: write its term papers, take over its paper route, agree to supply it with clean urine so it can pass a court-ordered piss test. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freak Scene,” Pavement’s “Range Life,” Mountain Goats’ “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” Destroyer’s “Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever”—those are but a few of my many game changers, and I’m sure you have yours: magical mystery tunes that forever change you and the way you hear music. Well, I heard a new one just yesterday—Eat Skull’s “Space Academy.”
Portland, Oregon’s Eat Skull is loosely affiliated with the nebulous genre that is being called “Shitgaze,” along with such purveyors of lo-fi scuzz as Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit, both of Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 2006 by Rob Enbom and Rod Meyer, both of Hospitals, along with bassist Scott Simmons and drummer Beren Ekine-Huett, Eat Skull put out a relatively hardcore first LP, then slowed things down on LPs two and three. It’s their third LP, 2013’s appropriately titled III, that includes “Space Academy”—an impossibly catchy combination of vaguely psychedelic melody, sublime vocals, and deafening and atonal guitars—but I actually prefer their 2009 sophomore LP, Wild and Inside. It doesn’t have a song on it as great as “Space Academy,” but it has a few that come close. And its ratio of songs that I love is higher than that of III, so Wild and Inside it is.
Wild and Inside is far more fuzzed out and lo-fi than III, which may explain why I hear the occasional echo of early Guided by Voices. Everything sounds submerged, as if they’d somehow figured out a way to record the LP at the bottom of a swimming pool—one filled with water. Opener “Stick to the Formula” is an impossibly muddy tune, but the catchy melody comes through loud and clear, as do the lines, “Stick stick stick/To the formula.” It’s a noisy tune for people who like the Carpenters, and it’s followed by the slapdash “Cooking a Way to Be Happy,” a noise-cluttered mid-tempo number that features lots of clattering of what I assume are kitchen utensils, some cool backing vocals, the whistle of a boiling teapot, and the great lines, “My town isn’t gloomy/My town isn’t sad/The only way to feel happy/Is to know what it means to feel bad.” I could be reading way too much into this one, but I wonder whether what they’re singing about cooking is meth.
“Heaven’s Stranger” is a gleeful raver, with group vocals and a joyous melody that will make you want to dance naked on your apartment balcony in the middle of an electrical storm. Or maybe it’s just me. Meanwhile, “You’re With a Thing” is an echoing minimalist number, with just the vocalist, a drum machine, and what I’m guessing is a synthesizer. It’s moody but not particularly satisfying, while follow-up “Nuke Mecca” is a full-tilt hardcore number and kinda reminds me of the Germs, at least until Eat Skull explodes into some Sonic Youth-level guitar noise that will make you think you’re in the subway and just touched the third rail. “Who’s in Control?” opens with roughly strummed acoustic guitars, and then in come a whole host of singers asking who’s in control. The melody is as catchy as the guitar is rawboned, and I wish I could understand more of what they’re singing, and now that I think of it this one could have come straight off of Charles Manson’s Lies.
“Killed by Rooms” opens with some strange noises, followed by a “1 2 3 4!” after which the band commences to make a mildly melodic din. You want lo-fi? You’ve got it on this one, which comes at you like a piece of vengeful farm machinery straight out of a Stephen King novel. As for “Happy Submarine,” it boasts a lovely melody, chiming but distant guitars, and a vocalist who sounds like he’s singing through a tin can attached by a string to another tin can in the producer’s booth. It is indeed happy making, this one, thanks in part to its humming guitars and simple to the point of retardation percussion. “Talkin’ Bro in the Wall Blues” opens with a synth and a repeated guitar figure before segueing into a slow and lovely (in its way) melody. Unfortunately that guitar figure predominates, when the band should be accentuating the melody. But hey, they’re adults, and under the First Amendment are free to do what they want, provided it doesn’t involve shouting “Theater!” in a crowded fire.
The instrumental “Surfing the Stairs” alternates between fuzzed-out surf guitar and chiming guitar, with a lot of background noise that could be the surf or the end of the world, but largely it just propels along like some kind of primordial sea creature crawling up the beach as it makes its transition, after billions of years, to dry land. “Dawn in the Face” is another winner; it opens with strummed guitars, and then in comes the vocalist wondering why anybody ever gets out of bed. The melody is sweet, and the occasional guitar is on the twangy and discordant side, and dawn is in your face and you might as well get used to it. Finally, “Oregon Dreaming” is an impossibly beautiful song, with humming guitars and a melody worth exactly $12,000. This one never fails to bring a smile to my face, and ends with a short guitar solo that I really like, and I strongly recommend it to everyone, except all the scumbags in the world who don’t deserve to enjoy it.
So yeah, Shitgaze. I like it. I like the sound of it and what its proponents, such as Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit, are doing, and I certainly like what Eat Skull is up to. Producing lo-fi music that makes a clamor without sacrificing melody is a noble goal, and I will gladly take over the paper route of “Space Assembly” on my stingray bike with banana seat, and hopefully while I’m at it pitch a paper through the picture window of any number of better-produced songs, especially if they were recorded by The Killers.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
