FOURTH ROTOR:
Plain: LP
I just don’t get it—when the hell did Matt Freeman start singing for a Steve Albini band? Seriously, this sounds eerily like Freeman fronting some bouncy, bass-throbbing Shellac cover band or something. Am I off on this one? Does anyone else hear this? The rhythm section really owns these songs, while the guitar mostly plays catch-up or offers little high-end alterations. It’s not as particularly heavy as Shellac, but that’s about the only band that comes to mind when I think of stuff like this. Needless to say, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other; the emphasis seems to be placed on discordance rather than catchiness, and unless you’re some kind of wunderkind virtuoso (i.e. really good at that shit), it’s a genre that rarely moves me. I’m all for toeing the line and trying to present something new, until a band reaches the point where each song just sounds like five or six different, totally random sections strung together. –Keith Rosson (Southkore)