Today is another unusual format for 7Inches, a 10" from Breakfast in Fur, served up by the fine folks that brought you the Analog Edition Zine, in which I wrote a little piece reminiscing about 1990-1995 and the lo-fi singles of the early internet days...when 7Inches was just a BBS board and AOL charged by the minute. Looks like Matt over there at Everybody taste is hitting the ground running with this label, also releasing a 7" from Blake Mills, I should get to shortly.The A-Side's, "I don't care" is has a ramshackle, bedroom ideology in the layers of cheap nylon string guitar. A laidback, high, toy piano and a twee-pop lens.
"High Hopes" gets more weirdo orchestral like something on Edible Onion, (Br'er?) It's possibly a Caribbean folk cover of that classic track that I think Frank Sinatra definitely did, which means, who knows who wrote it. Washboard, triangle, every possible percussion kit used on the drum machine, making it almost unrecognizable like any good cover.
"Shine" has an acoustic line feeling like Solsbury Hill. All over opting for a more succinct melody, much heavier produced than the rest. The number of instruments is always staggering and definitely belies that bedroom 'new toy' aesthetic but is perfectly recorded and assembled to feel like a slick carnival ride while being a quiet, introspective collage like Dead Gaze...or the Annuals ( that brother track is still an acheivement). Fade out to the voices of kids playing which you had to see coming with the sketch of a kid in a squirrel suit on the front of the sleeve. It's working with that naive spirit, the tracks conceived on the playground, the vocals scrawled in the sandbox. You'll never get that back and will spend the rest of your life trying.
10"'s do have the advantage over the single of looking like they were made for the turntable, the perfect size of the slipmat. That got me thinking about that Volar comp running at 45...are these two basically the same length? I would think so.
"A Quiet Place", from the B-Side is a real hushed number (makes sense) with heavy folk instrumentation against this layered near whisper vocal. This 10" seems to be growing up in a way the more it goes on. The real innocence is gone, things are getting more serious. Big distorted overdriven drums come in halfway, blowing the serenity apart...definitely live, just a hair out of sync at times in laying on that epic slow smoulder. The very definition of the title.
"Flying Saucers" is a barrage of bells with heavy delay ending up in an actual rhythm. Eventually a New Order guitar melody makes it's way in fading around the samples with a slow organ. Sort of Railcars in it's effort to put an obscene amount of instrumentation together. The way shoegaze did, but instead of a straight severe wall of guitar, it's a dense jungle of a million different impenetrable elements. Or like A Faulty Chromosome, this is a little more folk leaning but the experimentation keeps you guessing in the same way.
Finally, "Ghost Story" seems to have a lullaby-esque Bright Eyes temperament...as if it was going to suddenly shift back into darkness and reality at any given time. More quiet layers of acoustic and waves of background vocals with that organ, the spirit ohhhh's steering it away from catchy and towards the eerie.
Get one of the 500 pressed from Analog Edition
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