Album Reviews: Web in Front’s Favorite Local EPs of 2008

By Travis Woods

Though it’s not quite fair to stack up 3-6 song EPs against full, album-length works, were I inclined to do so, every EP here could stand toe-to-toe with the best local albums of 2008–each of these local EPs, through the breadth of their songwriting and the power of each band’s performance, stand as some of the best music of the year, regardless of the fact that many run on the shorter side of 30 minutes.

The Pity Party – HOTWORK
A spacious, noir-ish haze of grimy and melancholic electronica flowering at the center of a series of minimalist, circular guitar spirals, the HOTWORK EP offers a snapshot of The Pity Party in a more relaxed mode (with the exception of the hyperdriven and highwire kinetics of “HOTS”’ brink-teetered howls and rollercoasting dynamics) than usual, as the band explores the strange and alluring dark corners and spaces within their experimental and melodic grindscapes. And, as far as the exploration goes, the seductive multitracked vocals of “Love Lies” along with the slow clatter of the stop-start stutterpop and loping melodies of “Wanting What” both bring back ample rewards, but it’s the piano-plinked vortex of “Bottom of the Hole,” with it’s swooning vocal curves and seemingly heartbroken and heartbreaking climax—“I don’t know how I’m gonna tell you”—that’s the real treasure.

The Transmissions – Greater Imperfections
Over edgy, Edge-y guitar spirals, the Transmissions not only live up to their EP title, they go beyond it—taking dangerously imperfect genres like prog, space rock, and psychedelia, the band Rubik’s cubes them into something great: writhingly beautiful shapeshifters that lash from ballads to bombast rock and back while making breakneck detours into noise-jangled experimentalism and pop songcraft. Imperfect? Far from it.

The Sweet Hurt – In the Shade of Dreams
The Sweet Hurt’s new EP, In the Shade of Dreams, is a slowburn cascade of Wendy Wang’s deep, gorgeous vocals falling over a shimmered bedrock that blends the chestcaving ache of her traditional balladry with a surprising burst of sprightly indie-pop. “Where Would You Go,” the EP’s soul-stunned opener, unfurls steadily, with a casual beauty and slow acoustic trickle that eventually flowers into the disc’s broken heart of emotional and sonic crescendos, both of which are flawlessly interwoven—and all within two minutes.

Elsewhere, “Bright Ideas” is a curveball of disarming, blissful pop, a sky-cracking ray of sunlight that helps to both offset and illuminate the darker threads that weave throughout the EP, to the point that the light and dark intertwine into a concentrated, hipswayed caress of haunted beauty—as we’ve said before, rarely has a band’s name aligned, with such quiet, numinous precision, with its sound.

The Flying Tourbillon Orchestra - Escapements
“Audry (Love Keeps Moving),” the knotted, metamorphed closer to the Flying Tourbillon Orchestra’s dreamy, sand-blasted EP, Escapements, acts not only as the record’s final collapse of modernized, travel-weary chamber pop, but as a summation of the EP and the band’s sound as a whole—an acoustic tangle of boy-girl vocals and nimble baroque arrangements that vacillate from the dizzied spiral staircase of the galloping “Don’t Be Fooled,” to the string-stung slow-sprawl of tracks like the laidback “Strings” or the hallucinatory, cough-syruped lullaby “In a Dream.”

It’s those opposing poles that spin the disc upon their axes, with the resulting blur forming a cohesive panorama of the Orchestra, with it’s inversions of artists like the Zombies and Scott Walker funneling into the band’s own original twilight popscapes of meticulous production and fine-edged sonic details, forming a song cycle that is both out of time and of it—Escapements sounds as if it could be some strange, left of the dial classic in a dust-hazed attic record bin as it does the shining modern indie record it so clearly is.

The Happy Hollows – Imaginary
You know all of the influences—covered copiously enough by every writer (including this one) who has ever laid ears on the Happy Hollows—but it’s what the band does with those influences that makes them, and their Imaginary EP (an aural prologue to a full-length in ’09), such an ear-ringing pleasure of deranged pop and art-slung punk. Instead of succumbing to an imitation of earlier bands or playing within the constraints of a singular genre, the Hollows use their collective inspirations as a launching pad into their own giddily off-kilter stratosphere that meshes coy, knee-socked guilelessness with a chaotic abandon of jagged mantis rage.

It’s a sound that the band strives for and achieves in their best moments, one of which happens to be Imaginary’s central whirpool, “Tambourine,” a furiously red-lined churn that features a vocal performance from frontwoman Sarah Negahdari that is second only to the band’s own “My Wet Tongue” in terms of sheer, sensuous frenzy and charm. It’s also a witty story-song that sonically epitomizes who and what the Happy Hollows are—sugared “do do do do dooo do”’s mix with volcanic rhythms and unhinged screaming to form a strangely sweet molten slush that’s as edgy and explosive as it is paradoxically tuneful and lovely.

Extremely well-paced and executed, Imaginary, like “Tambourine,” is both a distillation and consolidation of everything the band does well—from the militant and rolling fingertapped guitar freakouts that rupture “Lieutenant”’s breath-fluttered breakdowns, to the stinging rhythmic rush of “Labyrinth,” to the oddly appropriate, jubilant collapse at the 2:12 mark of the hyperactive “Colors”—so much so that this five-song EP verges on the definitive in terms of the Happy Hollows’ essential sound.

December 23, 2008 | Filed Under Album Reviews, Exclusive Features, Features of 2009, Music News, New Music Preview, Residency Diaries, Site News 

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