Every year Portland, Oregon’s local tabloid, The Willamette Week showcases its best new band of the year with a cover story. They’ve honored all sorts over the last five years, from the dark maledictions of Talkdemonic to Menomena’s fusion of funk and art rock. This year, while the local instrumental five-piece AU (pronounced ay-you) isn’t their choice for the best new band in the city, they are in the top ten.
Interesting choice.
The songs on Verbs, the newest record by AU, are definitely tactile, woven bits of ecstatic sonic fabric which seem to meld together every sound under the sun—from horns, to woodwinds, to the proverbial kitchen sink. On the opening two songs, “All My Friends” and “Are Animals” (which absolutely must be taken as a single statement, at least in my mind), they foist keyboards, gadget sequencers, and absolutely enormous nonsensical choral vocals into a bonfire of aural excitement. “Summerheat” is the opposite, that just languid enough traipse through ankle-high grass. “All Myself” sounds like an instrumental refugee from Lou Reed’s Berlin in both its loose instrumental swirl and hard-hitting emotional center.
There is an indescribable, almost opaque quality to most of the songs on this record. Whether that level of stubborn divide is intended or not is wholly uncertain—mostly because there is a lot of this going around out there over the nine tracks: fluid sounds, followed by total cacophony, blends of rock and ambience, voices from the ether and otherwise.
It’s like a mass of clay without definition. Good? Maybe. Certainly worth repeat listens.
|