Artist: Slenko & McKeys
Album: Atone Lower
Year: 2017
Bandcamp
Speaking for no man but myself, the thing that keeps me coming back to Godspeed! You Black Emperor records is the way that band channels the idea of being crushed by something large and unstoppable and delivers it into my headphones. Its music feels like living through the prologue of disaster fiction. It is Fallout without the humor.
Slenko & McKeys don’t have that same grandiose sense of scope, but they’re playing in the same sandbox. Over the course of 45 minutes, broken up into three functionally-nameless tracks, Atone Lower blows apart elements of folk, blues rock and noise, reforming it into a post-rock landscape that distorts Americana into a controlled chaos. A lot of this comes from the guitar tones the group plays with, but the duo deserve credit for their smaller-scale ambitions, intentional or not. There’s only so big and blown-out music can sound with just a drum and a guitar.
If there’s a way to write about this stuff without devolving into purple fiction, I haven’t found it. This record made me think of ghost towns, prairie dust, walking miles without seeing another living thing. It made me feel dusty and isolated. It was great.
Atone Lower will be available on cassette on Monday, November 20, 2017
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