The Eye The Ear
And The Arm
Paths
Portia Records
By Jose Fritz
All hail the power trio: it’s an ancient rock n’ roll tradition like sex with minors, sending weed by FedEx and shooting yourself in the temple with an illegal firearm. Power trios came to rise in the 1960s. These strident and bombastic technicians were the epitome of musicianship for decades. The advent of practical and affordable amplifiers allowed a trio to compete for the first time in terms of volume with dance orchestras. They broke a band down into the basest components and rebuilt music from there: bass drums and guitar equated rhythm, percussion and melody: The Eye The Ear and The Arm.
The foot the hand and leg. The mouth the nose and the torso. The lungs the liver and the pancreas. The celiac plexus the meniscus and the brainstem. The stanza the chorus and the indulgent guitar solo. The small label the press servicing and this music review. These pixels, your eyes and your positive galvanic skin response.
A truly great album seizes your attention. It grabs your ears tightly and pulls you in close so that its face obscures everything else. If an album grabs you like that from the start, you don’t forget it. Albums like that convert listeners into advocates, into pundits and zealous evangelical fans. The album’s ferocious, not like Brooklyn hardcore, but like North Midwestern emo-core. The songs alternate moodiness and discontent, brooding melancholy and aggressive bluster. It brings me back to that sincere fierceness I heard in the first record by Traindodge.
The album is strong enough that it actually defies explanation that the band Amestory donated a producer and a drummer to the sessions. But if one band’s amputation is another bands gain, who am I to argue? Paths was produced by Alex Newport, who was in Fudge Tunnel and Nailbomb. Did I say fierce? Newport is the living embodiment of the hoards of rampaging Mongols descending on your home stereo. Fear him. But I digress.
As a whole, Paths relies more on the brooding melancholy than magniloquent prog-rock. Singer Derek Coburn warbles his way through half the record making songs like “King Of Thieves” and “The One With The Golden Tongue” seem all the more intense. It fills out the album like a sock in your drawers. The works are substantive, devoid of the usual filler: the floating rib, the appendix, and the coccyx.
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