Album Review: Xu Xu Fang – The Mourning Son

By Travis Woods

Release Date: 5.26.08

Label: Self-Released

Xu Xu Fang’s new EP, The Mourning Son, is a series of strange, rainy afternoon reveries—semiconscious slides into hazy, psych-swirled song structures strung together with rock that alternates from following ‘post’ to preceding ‘and roll.’ Interspersed with the cloudshade ambience of thunderstorm rumbles, the music doesn’t play so much as it unfurls—gently insistent cascades of rolling guitar noise churn beneath breathy, ominous vocals in “These Days,” blending with a slow-motion rhythm section to create a near-perfect storm of loping, looming beauty and ear-drummed foreboding that bleeds throughout the remainder of Son.

Elsewhere, the title track not only lends the EP its name, but is also the centerpiece around which the disc haloes —not only does it build on the foundation of “Days,” but with its chugging swirl of ascending guitar riffs and luminescent Nyquil pools of hypnotic vocal harmonies, it acts as a sonic umbilicus between the swinging, increasingly propulsive rock of “Good Times” and the EP’s bizarre shadow terminus of quietly unsettling ambient noise, ‘Terra Scurra,” binding the album’s extremes into a cohesive whole of simultaneously menacing and alluring lunar noise.


Xu Xu Fang – “Good Times” Live @ Spaceland, Nov.2007

 

A new interview with the band can be read here, at Classical Geek Theatre.

May 27, 2008 | Filed Under Album Reviews 

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