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The sound of ducks fucking ! The sound of Little apple cores hopping around atop some cute boutique bootleg Plastics and Ramones Tshirts ! New wave is rotting
PS: NOT mastered by Mickey Young
Our take: I really enjoyed the BB Eye 7” a while back, but this new 12” is really a big step up from that. Given the opportunity to spread out on a 12”, BB Eye don’t just write the same song over and over, but rather explore a lot of different ideas. There’s a bit of a mix tape vibe here, but rather than sounding schizophrenic it really only serves to highlight how one-dimensional most bands are. It seems like most groups feel around for a formula that works and then work to explore how flexible that formula is, giving all of the songs on a particular release a fairly uniform aesthetic. However, BB Eye seem to deliberately avoid saving any templates, approaching each new song as if they were starting a new band. Some songs have an earworm quality (there’s no way you don’t walk away from this record humming “I want to poke you poke you poke you… in the eye!”), others get into more of a drone-y, repetitive space that reminds me of early songs by the Fall (see “Dating a Fly”), and then there’s the chilled-out new wave of “Butterball’s Lament” that closes the record on an extremely strong note. Given that it’s so all over the place this record can come off as tossed-off on the first listen, but the more it sinks in the more you realize how many interesting and memorable ideas are crammed into each song. Taken as a whole, the overall vibe of this record reminds me a lot of Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets LP… it’s the sound of very smart and ambitious musicians stretching out, exploring, and enjoying the freedom of being oblivious to the world’s expectations. I really can’t recommend this highly enough, and with a few more listens it may well replace the Janitor Scum LP as my favorite release yet on the Lumpy label.