blank dogs: under and under (in the red)

goddamn have in the red been on a hot frickin roll recently.  another belter here, slightly behind schedule with this one (and a few others…) but been waiting like a sweaty end of days obsessed millenist around 11:59 31/12/99 for the expanded vinyl and it’s certainly worth chucking out some belated words about.

can i get through this without mentioning joy division?  can i hellfire.  without meaning it in the pejorative the whole record sounds like joy division’s more -punk than post- numbers.  there’s no point hiding it with vague allusions to monochrome, monotone, factory town grey crunch post-punk manchester via brooklyn shite.  i won’t lie to you.  not unless they pay me.

anyway there’s been fuckloads of releases now on various formats.  none dissimilar to this but certainly there was more distorto muck being spread around previously, grimy electronics and muffled vox underneath the vaguely garagey new wave geetar.  still distinctly unhi-fi but not entirely lo-fi.  been thinking of a middle ground.  mo-fi.  more fidelity?  nah…

more tarnished pop than anything else.  the electronic sludge and homemade guitars all cardboard boxes and electrified rubber bands have been scrubbed clean like fresh meat in prison.  that said, the cheap synth, skuzzy effects and hiss of mangled four track recorders isn’t entirely gone.  and the likelihood of his anonymous mug appearing in heat magazine remains unlikely.

anyways under and under.  like the name, and his golden bloody anonymity, the record is a strangely blank beast.  everything seems shrouded, vague, vaguely out of tune, out of whack, almost (in)coherent, almost detached, not wanting to be anything in particular.  not that there’s anything half-assed about it, more that it has a semi-casual spunked out feel.  like yr guided by voices or ariel pinks or jay reatards, his stuff has a wonderful just made it up feel to it.

i don’t hear the cure (mainly coz i don’t listen to the cure (the smiths aside, is there any band less worthy of adoration from these shores?)).  but i do hear in amongst the ghost-of-curtisisms, smidgens of john carpenters synth work (which frankly is bloody everywhere these days, and nobody is loving that more than me) and some of trans am’s 80’s bass led vibe, with or without the playful irony, i can’t tell.

bung in some help from various crystal stilts and vivian girls and at the end of the day you have twenty glorious tracks (five extra on the lp) of skewed fuzzy pop i s’pose.

and i fucking dig skewed fuzzy pop.

blank dogs / in the red / sacred bones / woodsist