Laurels

90-95 (Dot Dot Dash)
by Nik Rainey

Providence’s Laurels play a peculiar brand of loud art-rock, so dark and powerful that it’s hardly a surprise that it’s been apportioned out mostly in the small doses of seven-inchers and EPs. 90-95 performs the service of collating many of those tracks in one heavy dose, and it’s a friggin’ stunner of a trip. In truth, they shoulda reversed the title, as this comp creeps backwards from their newest four-track spewage to their first recordings for R.I. indie Heparin. The new stuff is slippery and disorientating, fragmented blurts of tension anchored by Joe Propatier’s sturdy backbeat, and tossed about the sine waves by the two-headed snake of Roger Foley’s wobble-stun six string and the fuzz-burn of bassist/warbler Jeff Toste, whose unsteady, echoplex vocals are a mixture of mealy-mouthed Ian Curtisisms and wide-eyed-boy-on-peyote-in-hell cries that rival those of primo David Thomas. (Pere Ubu’s singer, that is, not the Wendy’s guy.)

The earlier tracks that follow, recorded in a real studio with old drummer John Masterson, are the slightest bit more conventional by comparison. But that’s just a trick of the ear. The guitars are given more sonic space to cajole and then pummel you into the shock corridor of their choice as Toste whispers, incants, and hectors you through a busted loudspeaker. The dynamics are breathtaking, whether they’re jumping from a distended Confusion is Sex squall, to a swollen lope within a single measure on “Violence,” or suddenly bursting into a breakneck hardcore sprint in “Rex.” This is one vortex I’m happy to be sucked into. And I really like the psycho kitty on the cover.