I’ve written a line or two about Toronto’s Art the Band, last year, when I found out about their full-length, Boost Unavailable. I was impressed and awed by it, so it’s with great anticipation and matching expectations that I’ve approached their most recent release, the Snacks EP. I wasn’t aware that it was coming, so I was surprised, and, upon listening to it, was once again surprised. I have to say that I didn’t exactly recall what Art the Band was about, but Snacks quickly corrected this. The first and “Big Track” is a pretty standard jazz … Read more
Tag Archives: math rock
II II II – Frequency Illusion
Leeds-based mathcore one-man band [reference needed] II II II (read “two two two”) released their debut album, A Conundrum on My Coffee Table, which we adored, back in 2012. Fast forward four or five years, and they share some work-in-progress demos on their facebook page, stating that they were looking for a new vocalist. Without it being announced officially, they found one! The name hasn’t leaked yet, but the voice remains in the same vein as before. Well, here we are now: we received an advanced digital copy of Frequency Illusion, coming out on September 22. What is … Read more
fulusu – Old House #1
Most of my exposure to Japanese rock (j-rock) has been through Anime theme songs, but it’s a genre I’ve dipped further into from time to time when an Anime theme has really grabbed me, especially with bands like The Pillows, Flow, Nico Touches The Walls, Veltpunch, and Maximum The Hormone. So when I saw this promo for fulusu’s debut American release Old House 1, it totally piqued my interest. This album starts out with some ambient noise on ‘Ra’ that continues into second track ‘Consideration: Rain’ and abruptly ends to reveal the melodic j-rock … Read more
Porcus vs. Equus – Music out of Shit
Australia’s experimental rock band Porcus vs. Equus just released a single, or short EP, under the name Music out of Shit. With merely three tracks and a runtime of just eight minutes, M.O.O.S. is very short, but also very sweet. First of all, ‘Wet Sugar (Player vs. Environment)’ is a magnificent song to begin with. Reminiscent of the Spaghetti Western aura of Robotmonkeyarm, with their reverb-laden, aggressively-plucked overdriven guitar notes, Porcus vs. Equus bring in some rhythmic and structural surprises into this complex ear-worm of a song. At over three minutes long, it’s the least concise of the triptych, … Read more
Marateck – Time Is Over
We recently discussed a band that takes math rock to the extremes in terms of technical skills, to the detriment of the ‘math’ aspect, but here’s a band that does the opposite. Marateck don’t play thirty-second notes and they don’t quickly arpeggiate extended chords, but they ingeniously integrate polyrhythmics and polymetrics into often odd-time signature compositions. This is more evidently displayed on their debut album, Time Is Over, which was released on July eleventh. Of course, playing such counter-intuitive timings and measure subdivisions is a technical feat in itself, but it unfortunately garners much less attention than playing … Read more