Weighted Pines
Braden J McKenna is an interesting character. I’ve never had an email from him which was much longer than a single sentence. Even after naming his Navigator album in my top two favourite albums of 2009, all I heard from him was a one line ‘thanks very much, here’s something new we just released’.
There’s absolutely no need to say any more than that, of course, and in fact any sort of thanks is really nice, but I’m not just talking about emails. Look at the MySpace pages of both Navigator and Weighted Pines, and there’s not exactly a surfeit of information. The label on which all of this brilliant music is released is called Magic Goat, and their website has recently been redesigned to actually include less information. Have a look at that site and try and imagine anything more minimalist.
This music is described as being inspired by nineties US indie bands, and it’s certainly a different animal to the fuzzy full band setup of the Navigator record. The guitar here is more pecked at, often producing quite a staccato sound, compared to the distorted background of noise which characterised Bad Children. The percussion seems to have a little more rattle to it as well.
In general, though, this, for all I love an awful lot of it, does need something of a health warning: it really, really is fucking rough. Some of the tracks, like Twentyfive and Small Town, for example, are extremely lovely, and show that McKenna’s voice has the capacity to be tremendously sympathetic when he chooses it to be, but there’s still an awful lot of cacophonous fuzz on this album which will probably put all but the most rapid fans of confrontationally messy recording off completely.
A couple of songs get close to being two minutes in length, but only a couple. The rest last roughly a minute or so, and that’s yer lot so, for all you might think that some of the more abstract pieces are a bit frivolous, there is absolutely no buggering about here at all. None.
So if you are starting to feel like you want to run a million miles from the attention whoring on things like the X-Factor, or from the polished tedium of Vampire Weekend, or the desperate cackling of T4, or the appalling smugness of Jules Holland, then this is about as far from anything even slightly commercial as you can get. Everything’s downloadable for nothing from the label site: Magic Goat Music, a bizarre oasis of talent from Bone Valley, Utah, one of the most unexpected labels and unexpected places and unlikely groups of people I could possibly imagine.
Weighted Pines – Small Town
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