Violens - 11/6 - (Magic Stick)

This is a fun, engaging pop record...at certain points. It's driving, jangly, good-time shambly college rock riffage. It's also a head-swirling lava-lamp odyssey of manipulated feedback howl and synthesizer showers. Guitar-roaring, echo-wrung psychedelia. It's also a fine example of dream-pop revivalism with it's twinkly synth effects and dizzying, looping harmonies. It's also organ-humming, groovy back-beat pounding 60's Brit-pop send up.... It's even got some weird mutant cross breeding of those faux-operatic 80's pop male crooners dipping into ultra-fuzzed goth trips.

I really don't know where to start. It's like a pop-record Twister matt, with each of the trios hands and feet stuck into different sensibilities and time periods. This is Violens first proper LP after an EP, a handful of mix-tapes and a handful of remixes (MGMT) - and it feels like, with their pleasing schizophrenic balance, that they're on their way to being the true inheritors of the strange love-child betwixt Roxy Music and the Smiths.... but with much more fuzzed-out-noise-pop-psychedelics.

Listen: Violens - "Acid Reign"

Band's Site

Friendly Fire Recordings