Eat Skull- Wild and Inside
Fri 19 Jun 2009
Eat Skull- Wild and Inside
7/10
Portland-based experimental noiseniks Eat Skull initially grabbed me with their epic, visceral, menacing chant crusting over into soda scum on ‘Beach Brains’. Wild and Inside is their second album, out on Siltbreeze, home to such other celebrated noisy acts as The Dead C, Times New Viking and US Girls. Eat Skull is unflinchingly low-fi but carves out of this ramshackle sound some pure pop buried deep beneath. They forego any hint of mastering but this means the songs have a wonderful down-home jam feel to them. Concise as they are, they segue into each other well and have a sing-along charm to them. Occasional sweet harmonies the likes of the Beach Boys merge with a droney tendency and a particular liking for muddily recorded, naturally occurring sound effects. Through all this their mundane lyrics are illustrated with a scraggly rock sound. It’s joyous and sweet, fun and liberating. A broader range is exhibited than you might think possible with such a crappy sound quality – street punk in ‘Nuke Mecca’; unusual folk rock in ‘Who’s In Control?’; jangly pop in ‘Happy Submarine’. Eat Skull has timed their debut well, at a time when the world is enthralled with bedroom noise bands, they have unwittingly entered a school of sound.
Sarah
July 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
This album sucks, this band sucks, The Dead C haven’t released anything on Siltbreeze for over 10 years, Times New Viking aren’t on Siltbreeze now and haven’t been since Present The Paisley Reich came out, and although TNV are/were good, they are at least partly responsible for this wave (Wavve?) of “bedroom noise” shit.
In my opinion.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
And it isn’t their debut either.
July 18th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
FAIL
July 18th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
jackson is brainy