The seven inch series is an ambitious undertaking. Gold Robot Records very first releases were on the humble 7" format back in 2007 with a release from Roman Ruins. It's great to see them return to the diminutive size that started it all and with not just one single, but the beginning of an entire series, "GOLD". The first one kicking this off is from Brooklyn's Conveyor, a band who I found out recently scored THX 1138 live at the nitehawk cinema in Williamsburg and have released material previously on GR. Hunter says these tracks came out of sessions for their full length due out in 2014.
"Mammal Food" dives seriously into the weird off kilter sound and rhythm of multiple layered distorted vocals that come down on the side of Jeff Magnum tracks from Airplane... with that same kind of reckless abandon. Crashing headbashing cymbals on top of chamber music layers of '70s glam. A gleaming pop attention to detail while staying experimental and in the spirit of those 4 track nightmare's from Lou Barlow or early Bill Callahan with the devices of today. The gleaming clean of even harder too hit appropriate amounts of crackle and weirdness to make the track surprising even to the band. Impossible to duplicate live and I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the direction of this series because something this complex and unique is only going to exist exactly like this on the seven inch format. These truly bizarre, intense experiments come in fits and starts run through a variety of effects that compress and sustain and then distort, whatever they were originally ends up in this layered dessert of day glo colored cake. It's not natural - but it's impossible to ignore tempting delicious cake.
They continue to bring their sense of blown out, unhinged madness to B-Side's "Pushups" with supremely blown out guitar distortions of classic pop melodic songwriting reinterpreted by alien robots who came in contact with "I want to hold your hand" after it had traveled millions of miles. breaking up somewhere near a comet and meticulously pieced back together by generations of mechanical offspring. Haunting foreign voices over a bare, stripped down kick and snare recorded in that empty practice room with a drunken sliced up guitar's dying breath. The exact meaning of these lyrics are escaping me, they've managed to land this airplane of demented autotune effects into a chorus of distorted robots like a Polyphonic Spree of broken machines writing their latest attempt to prove they should get into heaven. The same way Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots sounded so unbelievably alien, so crytal clear and muddy at the same time, catchy and impossible to follow. Conveyor is dealing with those contradictions sounding incredible on vinyl turned up to catch the subtle crackles of those pedals melting.
You can also bet that Hunter has gone to great lengths to press this on gold vinyl in a die cut sleeve. Only 250?! Get this from Gold Robot Records.
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