Construction and Destruction – Video et Taceo
I’m assuming that this album must be post-something, because stuff that’s kind of difficult to describe is usually called post something or other, although buggered if I know what. It was passed to me by Ruth from the Bowerya month or so ago and I’ve listened to it a lot since then.
I suppose if you started at early Smog and intead of moving to more melodic territory from there you continued to snap your guitars, keeping the sound really bassy and maintaining an aura of disquiet. It’s as if these guys take a few more of their aural cues from punk, I guess, although I would never say that this music sounded punky, just that at times it sounds like they’ve been listening to a lot of it.
I suppose the reason I’m finding this a little tricky is that at heart it’s a lot like a lot of other things I listen to. The band are largely a boy-girl duo – David Trenaman and Colleen Collins – and Collins’ voice has that flightly indie-folk female character to it which has been so popular in the last few years at the more spectral end of the alternative scene.
The music is dominated by acoustic guitars and , but when it breaks it does so in a much more aggressive indie-rock style than I find myself expecting. The female vocal in particular harks back to some of the shrill early 90s vocal styles of the likes of Tanya Donnelly and Kristen Hirsch, as does the guitar work.
Then there are the synths, which are not used in the electro style of the Animal Collectives of this world, and also have more of an early 90s rock sound to them. So it’s not that the music doesn’t sound largely familiar at its core, more that the details used to embellish it move in a different direction to those which a lot of the album might suggest.
So this ends up being not the album I have loved the most over the last few months, but certainly one of the ones I find the most fascinating.
Construction & Destruction – The Scaffold
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Construction & Destruction – B-Flat
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The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people’s former bands. There’s Shane MacGowan’s Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron’s Radiators, Shilpa Ray’s Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg’s Riff Raff.
