Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Inflatable Best Friend / Bongonya Split - self released


Ian from Inflatable Best Friend let me know about their indiegogo project for this split single with Bongonya. The names alone should literally be enough to sell you on these two, this isn't going to be timid. They aren't going to bore you with long form jams or quiet meandering melodies and it's definitely not going to let you listen to this in the background thinking you don't have to pay complete attention to the quicksand sucking you under.

Messy jangle chords ring out on "Beelzebum" and the snare rolls in with a massive explosion of Swirlies style indie sludge. Massively piled on distortions let Tanner deliver a couple of layers of vocal over this Sonic Youth off kilter art punk. The guitars stake out beefy claims in most measures but the drums get tougher bashing out full roundhouses. The only vocal I can make out is about breaking into a home done in his blanked out face chanting - deliberately opposite this emotional playing that expects all obstacles to move out of the way or get blown clear off the shelves. The drum pattern's delicate pieces carefully stack up only to fall apart at the end of course. From what I remember of DMT Bike Ride these guys are really expanding their sound here, getting bigger and heavier all the time. Full inflated, surefooted and dissonant, you can't chalk it up to an accident. "750 Dollar Ambulance Ride" finds that jangly guitar again in the tone and style of some kind of Don Caballero dark satanic chant, or a heavy metal Gang of Four. They go for the minimal sounding precision cutoff jeans while getting grunge and blues about this. What a fucking wall they've built out of the last battle scarred pieces of metal and doom. Real future Butthole Surfers stuff here; guitar rules the day with possessed chanting and throwing things together in instinctual ways. Repeat stuttered brut force chords in a gutteral Liars or These Are Powers vein, the ghosts are strong here. These guys are getting weirder and it's time to get on board.

Bongonya (say that real slow) does "Two Month Front" on the B-Side that gets right into big layered guitar metrics scrawling like a stock market ticker. It takes a slight break for the drums to get a word in, but the guitars are just too heavy and in change of where the ultimate direction of this fast and loud morass is headed. Epic sounding riffs come in raw and staccato while another side of this soars away in the lower reaches or upper heights of prog metal. They forego lyrics all together and this takes turn after turn of fast and technically challenging breaks, it's a little bit Fucking Champs and beyond without getting too equation heavy. During a tom solo break you get the feeling your brain isn't going to ever process this beyond pure sound and by now I'm completely ok with that. Chunky muted string percussion runs... can't tell what combo of rim shots and chg chg chg guitar lines are making up this frantic bluesy, eastern sounding guitar. A huge reverb has been in play this whole time and this metal surf rock has come to muddy the waters so you won't ever want to get into the water again.

Originally only available from their crowd funded page, but try emailing 'Don't Panic It's A Distro' at (itsadistro at gmail) to see if they have a few more copies. No samples of this one, bandcamps below:



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