Upon hearing something from this on WFMU a few months ago, I just had to hear more and I immediately ordered this and another CDR by this group ("Music For The Leisure Time", Series II Records). Both discs are pretty similar and a few tracks show up on both, so I'm only going to review one of them.

Anyway, this group is from New Haven, CT, which is near where I grew up, and they play a very noisy, sloppy brand of shoegaze-ish indie pop. The drum machine beats must be played in real time because they're definitely not machine-precise. Distortion and reverb and fuzz cover everything, as you might expect, and it does sort of drown out the songs sometimes. But there's definitely a few bits that just completely take me by surprise. The title track starts out with some outrageous heavy riffing, settles into a stumbling beat with several tracks of vocals every which way in the mix, until everything pauses for a bit and jangly, distorted riff comes in with some really harsh crunchy beats. The vocals don't really seem to match the melody, but it's hard to tell because it sounds like there's a million things going on at once.

The rest of the band's song continue in this sort of confusing noisy-pop vein. I can't always tell what I'm hearing, but it's doing strange things to my head and I'm curious to hear where this group goes next. 7/10 -- Paul Simpson (3 February, 2010)