animal faces / mountanaka / we fled cairo / early transcendentals
28-07-2011
confederation park, ottawa
despite the decidedly pretentious math-rock band name, the style of early transcendentals is decidedly jazz. sure, there are psychedelic, space and "post" influences, but all modern jazz is fusion, right? while the drummer liked to play between the beats a little, there weren't many odd time signatures and the guitar lines were more in the sphere of masturbatory jazz improv than in the world of angular riffage.
while what they played was certainly interesting, i must admit that i didn't find it compelling; i had but a single beer for the evening, and i couldn't clearly recall the set at the near point of walking out of the bar after the show. if you see them on the bill somewhere, don't skip them...but i'd advise against making the trip specifically for them.
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while a (short) review for the we fled cairo set was written, it seems to have been lost.
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while mountanaka's bandcamp site tags just about every form of existing cool rock music, it misses the one that i think describes them best: grunge, in a nascent, mid-80s sense. they seem to do everything right, from the prodding riffs to the scream-o vocals, but there's something missing in the sound, something that's hard to put a finger on. hooks? that's not quite what i mean. counterpoint? well, the best grunge is built on it, you know. i'm getting close, but i'm not quite there...
they'll cave your head in as well, or better, than the next grungey hardcore band that plays your town, but i'm not convinced the songs are worth listening to once the show's over.
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the reigning, and perhaps remaining, styles of novel punk-derived experimental rock music are in the areas of post-hardcore, math and noise rock, and that's something that will likely serve as a bottleneck for rock music in the upcoming decade. this has been through the head of that bottleneck and, yes, is fairly generic relative to what's been floating around for the last couple of years, although, to be fair, it is also done generically well, if that makes sense, and it should. you've definitely heard this before...
however, animal faces put on a great show. the record is very badly mastered; it sounds as though everything was put through way too many limiters, which means that the dynamics in the recording are dead. those limiting issues were not present when i saw them tonight. while the heavier bass at the show helped define the song structures a little bit better and the more pronounced shifts in guitar dynamics gave the sound more immediacy, the biggest improvement in sound that removing the limiting allowed was in drawing more attention to the force that the drummer applied to his kit. this kid hits his drums hard and seems to let a lot of emotion out in the process.
in order to get a better sound on the next record, they should utilize the albini trick of recording themselves live in a room. until then, if you get a chance to see them on stage, don't miss them rocking out.
i don't have footage from ottawa, but the first clip is from the same tour & the second is a full set from a few months earlier: