Fur's 'Here's to the Angels' EP - (follow up on the way - 8/13)

(Finally caught this local trio at the Lager House from the much-needed and commendable Echo Fest)

Listen: Fur - "Pretty Thoughts"

More info - Fur's site

If still just a trio, every instrument sounds huge. Fur leans toward the noise-experimentation/haunting beauty sides of psychedelic music. Most strikingly, from these 3 songs, is their ability to elucidate a bit of space between an otherwise flush sound of howling vocal-effects, strident soaring guitars, drum-fill heavy pummeling and an ever plodding bass.

While things can get so tight in the title track’s BRMC-ish classic-rock deconstructionist tear of torrential guitar slices, strangled hooking drums and winding bass, there’s palpable breathing room between the beats and rising surf-twanged guitars of distinguishing “Pretty Thoughts” – which, while it leans into familiar shoegaze territory, introduces a cherubic/banshee synth wave that brings in a slightly more dreamy, even warmer, quality, to save it from all those macabre clouds of metal-y, noise-rocky stuff.