My Education
Bad Vibrations
Strange Attractors
By Jose Fritz
Do you remember Stars of the Lid? I do. Back in 1993 that Austin group became the unsung masters of minimalist drone. Stars of the Lid were a duo, but there was a band behind them and it included both Kirk Laktas and Brian Purington. Stars of the Lid pressed on without them, and they degenerated into something from one of Harry Bertoia’s Somambient LPs. Kirk Laktas and Brian Purington absorbed the life lesson, and for the good of us all brought that lush soft exterior into the future.
Their debut 2002 album Five Popes officially put them at the forefront of the post rock movement. At their SXSW showcase that year a few tourists blessed out and never came back. They’re on intravenous feeding tubes in the coma ward of St. David’s Hospital. They do strange things to your brain. To paraphrase Zappa, they are a group that has yet to destroy your mind.
At that point you could say that comparisons to Tristeza, Mogwai, and Do Make Say Think are more than fair. Their 2006 album Moody Dipper showcased remixes by Kinski and Red Sparrowes. There was no more cred to be had within all of post-rock, so they went elsewhere. They found elsewhere at Deadverse Studios in North Jersey and the 12-inch single they cut with Dalek will give you an aneurysm while you sit back trying to understand it.
For Bad Vibrations, they began delicately stacking layers of accordion, guitar, organ, viola, piano, and vibraphone while blind folded in a dark room with the original cast of Godspell performing “Waiting for Godot” in sign language all around them. Perhaps that’s not true, but how would you know? The album is embedded with every possible sound from every possible instrument (except bagpipes.) We can assume nothing.
The whole idea of “post-rock” is that the music somehow supersedes the boundaries of rock and that’s what we see here. The use of viola and synthesizer is downright genre-bending. My Education has spent the last year playing with Pelican, Red Sparows, and ISIS with the effect being pronounced. Songs don’t slowly build; they explode backwards in massive teutonic crescendos.
They distort space and time, and suspend you within something. It’s one of those perpetual albums that can be played on repeat for hours. You put the CD in to the car stereo, you arrive at your destination, and then you sit in the parking lot with the engine in idle waiting for the song to end somewhere with enough closure that you can take the key from the ignition. It never does.
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