Album Reviews: Web in Front’s Best Local EPs of 2009

And so it begins.  After spending the past several weeks cataloging our top 250 songs of the decade, our inevitable year-end best-of lists are beginning in earnest, starting with our favorite local EPs of 2009.  Finding a good EP can be tricky–more often than not, they stand as stop-gap product to keep listener’s ears busy until a band can get around to recording a proper full-length follow-up to their last big record; however, they can also be invigorating windows into the development and evolution of a group, a quick snapshot of an up-and-coming band’s best new songs as they continue to grow (and wait for a record deal before putting out a full-length LP).

For this list, we simply selected those EPs from the latter of the two categories above (with the exception of #5, which was just too good to pass up, stop-gap or not), that most entertained us, surprised us, or floored us (often a combination of all three) throughout 2009, and whose short running time managed to last all year long.  Full list after the jump.

Note: Go here to read last year’s Best Local EP’s list. And expect the Best Local Albums of 2009 list on Tuesday, with our Best Albums of 2009 set to be published on Wednesday, and our Best Albums of the Decade to pop up next week.  Let the quibbling and nit-picking begin.

No Age – Losing Feeling

As far as between-LP releases go, Losing Feeling may be as good as it gets–it’s a four-song EP that lives up to the promise of Nouns‘ molten guitar overflow by continuing that record’s sound without any major sonic overhauls.  Opening with the crackling, insistent hooks of the title track, the EP quickly switches gears with the moody strum and whispers of “Genie” before settling into the elegiac drones and loops of the guitar-only instrumental “Aim at the Airport.”  Finally, No Age ties the EP together with the stunning “You’re a Target,” a closing track that gathers all the sounds of the preceeding 12 minutes before rupturing and exploding them outward in all directions like a supernova’d cascade of noise, complete with epileptic drums, anthemic vocals and a jet-engine guitar whine worthy of Kevin Shields.  It may not stake a claim in a new direction, or expand upon No Age’s foundations, but in four songs Losing Feeling not only heightens anticipation for the duo’s next full-length statement, it serves to highlight the very best of what this band can do.

Download “You’re a Target”

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Abe Vigoda – Reviver

Rarely does a band’s attempt at artistic riskiness equate streamlining their sound into something more accessible than previous efforts, but that’s exactly the move that L.A.’s Abe Vigoda makes on Reviver, the band’s EP follow-up to last years’ synapse-fried pressure cooker of tropical indie punk, Skeleton. While by no means middle of the road (dig the rolling crush of opener “Don’t Lie”), the band has tamed some of their wilder elements to openly reveal what Skeleton took days to make clear: beneath Abe Vigoda’s intense focus on (and love for) mind-bending and frenzied textures, there is a band hungry to evolve beyond the freak-punk genre tag immediately placed upon their implosive first three records. They even throw in a cover of Stevie Nicks’ “Wild Heart” just in case you didn’t quite get the message with such moody, psych-tinged atmospherics found in tracks like “House” and the stoner grooves of “The Reaper”—this is a band willing to grow by subverting and, even further, embracing accessibility without sacrificing what made them worth listening to in the first place.

Stream “Don’t Lie”

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Manhattan Murder Mystery – Skull

Opening with the gentle acoustic strum and moody croons of “Encyclopedia,” a bleakly glowing and gallows-humor’d ballad (“Encyclopedia, give me the words to say when she walks away”), Manhattan Murder Mystery’s Skull EP is a seemingly endless (as far as six songs go) series of pleasant sonic surprises, ranging from third-album Velvet Underground cool to Edwin Collins-styled awkward heartbreak to—best of all—the band’s own inimitable and endlessly listenable take on post-punk, which never sounds derivative (in a genre bloated with calculated posturing and theft) but writhingly assaultive and alive.

Elsewhere, the title track, “Skull,” gently kicks yours in with Matthew Teardrop’s frenzied warble and a series of lockstep rhythms; the harmonica-laced and rumbling “Ulysses,” with its boy/girl vocals and hook-lined choruses, may be the best pop song you’ve ever heard to name drop James Joyce; and if the closing “In the Parking Lot,” all epileptic throbs and nerve-sheathed howls, doesn’t cap off every mix you make for the next several weeks, you simply weren’t listening.   While I suggest you rectify that now, Skull simply demands it.

Stream “Skull”

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Red Cortez – Hands to the Wall

Opening with the thrashing, neck-snapped guitar rush and epic vocal cascades of “In the Fall,” Red Cortez’s first EP under their new moniker (the band released three EPs under their previous name, The Weather Underground) isn’t so much a stopgap to buy time before a full-length debut as it is a concise statement of aesthetic intent. Listen to the EP, as the jangly and nerve-spun “Fell on the Floor,” all rockabilly stomp and twist-tongued vocal delivery, flows into the oompah and otherworldly crush of “Laughing Streetcar” before the one-two punch of the pounding “World at Rest” and “All the Difference”’s lonely lullaby, and what you hear is a young band maturing before your ears—Red Cortez has wrestled the howlingly anthemic and earnest music of their early discs and fused it to a more insular, unique and personal sound, making the tunes even more heartfelt and human than the band’s previous incarnation of reaching rock ‘n soul.  Red Cortez, like the earlier version of the group, is still fighting; but this band’s revolution is now internal, and all the more powerful because of it.

Stream “Fell on the Floor”

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Aushua – Limbo

It’s one thing for a band to expand its horizons upon each new release, stretching their sound into new sonic territories and environs as they grow as musicians and artists; it’s another thing entirely to punch through those horizons into new stratospheres of excellence and beauty, to not so much expand into new arenas as to explode into them–which is exactly what Aushua has done with Limbo, the six-song follow-up to the solid and searching No Harm Done.

While No Harm Done stood as a unified declaration of Aushua’s sound and style, Limbo is that disc’s inversion–it stretches into multiple directions at once, fraying this way and that, chasing noises and riffs down one melodic, twisting alleyway after another, and forms an eclectic and staggering image of a band discovering its potential.  Songs like the ethereal grooves and howls of “Tuck (How it Feels Away)”, the coolly rippling and glistening crunch of the noisy “Pedestrian,” the one-two punch of hymn-like shouter “Hiding Place” and the closing shimmer of “God in Search of Man” whorl-print together into a dizzying chain of sound, one that feels like anything but limbo; rather, it sounds like a quantum leap forward.

Stream “Tuck (How it Feels Away)”

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November 30, 2009 | Filed Under Album Reviews, Exclusive Features, Music News, Site News 

Comments

One Response to “Album Reviews: Web in Front’s Best Local EPs of 2009”

  1. Scott on November 30th, 2009 11:16 am

    That Aushua EP is so good.




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