There's infinite variations on reverb. From giant cathedrals where the sound bouncing back might reach you before the original one does to 2 inch spring transducers in the back of an amp, it all comes down to how much sound is absorbed by the surfaces it's bouncing off.
All of that subtlety goes out the window when dropping the needle on this single from the Jensen Serf Company who are intimately familiar with all reflections of wet surf and channel the waves into an undertow of fuzzy pop punk.
"Electric Sister" dives straight into the crazy depths of reverb with no clear definition between those man-made separations… silly labels! It's about the feeling of this cramped space and bouncing yourself and these distortions off the freaking walls with Ty Segall or The Hussy’s energy and satisfying YALPS of spring echo. Ben Saylor and Pete Kokkinakos have locked themselves in this metal room together where the sound can’t escape, there’s no place for the distortion to go and it's a good thing because this is getting out of control. They wrestle with these reverbs on the vocal, all over the guitars, on peaking, hissy cymbals and high hats. I would bet when this was all over they played it back through speakers in the bathroom and rerecorded. There’s no end to the lengths of bouncing around sound they want to go to here. This is the sound of them taking their tight pop punk and injecting the chaos from echo over echo. I want to turn this up bad one more notch past that line the neighbor and I talked about.
Kick the amp… you hear that echoing plinky earthquake sound on “Memory”? That's a mic'd spring between the guitar and the speaker banging around and it signals the beginning of a good track. Stomping around, flicking the switches between pickups, include the raw sketch, this is the perfect moment. Remember how Wavves used to sound? That hand plant, wheelbarrow record sounded so good. It embraced those damaged sounds, the imperfections of turning it up past the point it made sense and became something else...like Times New Viking. JSC push that Columbus overdrive sound into the water and let the waves and tiki torches wash around a bit. The blown out surf reference is just the thing you want Florida to sound like, not the energy drink Springbreakers Skrillix version. Give me this squealing feedback...with semi-fart brruups from reverb? That’s a new effect. It’s sad because I don't even know what the lyrics are I’m obsessed with this sound.
It takes a good B-Side to expand on what they've been playing with and honing on the A-Side and with “Freak Museum” then pull out this acoustic sludge, sort of hinting at a woodsy Northwest sound that might even be a little bit psych in it's slowness, drowning in the reverb this time with big crashes of hiss to fading out…is this the end of the side...HELL NO. Pile on a thousand overdriven guitars in ungodly gritty distortion to bash away in a horrendous pile that tops even their A-Side.
I can't get enough of Ty and Mikal, or Jay and Seth, but I have to squeeze some room in for Jensen Serf Co after this blown out single pushing the volume and limits of echo catchy pop fuzz.
Pick this up from Jensen Serf Company or Loose Recordings
No comments:
Post a Comment