Furslide

Adventure (Virgin)
by Jamie Kiffel

Plastic babies’ heads with permanently stuck-staring glass eyes jammed neckhole-first on walking sticks have the same, vaguely alarming dashboard mess quality as this debut from Furslide. The elements, taken separately, are reassuringly easy to pigeonhole: worn and steely, filed-raw power chords; laser echoes; jet stream noise; repeated synths like light ringing in a nitroused brain; chip-on-shoulder, one-two strut funk; pimpy ’70s lyrics (“free ride candy-coated wet dream” in “One Hit Downer,” for instance), and the wah-wah quiver of a jiggled sheet of tin, for instance. What’s weird – and interesting – is that they all happen at once. I didn’t look up from my hangnails until track four, when my speakers suddenly blared Act IV of some Sondheim monstrosity I previously managed to avoid.

Piano glisses, tinkle tones and expectant, chromatic strings patently glide upward as a male/female harmonic sing, “You love me still, even though you should know better.” Didn’t Fantine or Christine or some -ine wail that line as a sewer backed up and drowned her? Segue nill: out blurt messy closet guitars like the basement of a junk shop, rough like Springsteen’s torn-up vox revving up for a car crash. Someone’s senile granny started a cozy quilt using scraps from her knitting basket and bits from her bin of battleship parts: thus this musical, often intriguingly atonal aggregate. A good measure of funk, scat vocals, groovy minimalism, maniacal cackles, and a ghostly waltz all rub elbows until the skin scores raw. The sorest point on this disc is its lyric quality, which is 7th grade introspective at best, molar-grinding dull at worst. Adventure‘s madly mismatched musical style more than makes up for the lyrical lack, and for a noise junkie, there is plenty here to get off on.
(338N. Foothill Road Beverly Hills, CA 90210)