Garden Variety – Knocking the Skill Level – Review

Garden Variety

Knocking the Skill Level (Headhunter)
by Joshua Brown

Long Island’s Garden Variety are the musical equivalent of viewing a paisley shirt through foggy glass. Or maybe a see-through dress on someone you weren’t hoping to see naked. The guitars make a moving collage of painterly abstract art, and the drums are an eraser following close behind, smudging everything into new and less coherent forms. The vocals are the frustrated poetry of the art student who, disgusted, crumples his work into a ball and throws it in the trash. Knocking the Skill Level is something to be experienced without judgment.