Točna sredina između Sonic Youth i My Bloody Valentine. Tj. malo više lijevo i gore.
www.brokenwatermusic.com/
[mp3] "Underground"
Jesus, this album often resembles Bardo Pond getting the Swirlies trashed in a squat, like proper primal, druggy and possessed indie rock but with this untamed demented tremelo'd pop sensibility driving through its veins. The songs where Abi sings are the cutest doses of phantasmagoric smack rock you'll hear right now on the US underground, proper maelstroms of sky shattering guitar meshing and downer space pixie vocals whilst the drums are often straight garage feral.
Guitarist Jon Hanna's songs are more cool slacker early '90s buzzbombs with a homely drawl draped over bafflingly familiar hooks. Yeah he does sound a bit Thurston. The third track 'Yank Dyagileva' conjures up prime Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and NY's Versus with a hint of the slightly dangerous A-Frames towards the end. Does anyone recall Babe the Blue Ox or X27? Hmmmm…I'm getting too obscure maybe?
This three piece have written a timeless melodic '90s US indie rock album, stacked with hits as far as I'm concerned and a couple of endearingly weak moments, one of which sounds a bit like Pearl Jam FM radio punk angst near the end but is still somehow cool.
But the gems for me are still where Abi sings, I'm smitten, this music so often rides on her murky rumbling bass and pure sad tones whilst Jon Hanna lets loose with hot wild guitar shredding and the steady earthy drums piledrive away. Both tight but brilliantly loose, these youngsters have developed rapidly since their last couple of wax platters chirped up the scene for us older, set-in-our-ways types.
This is the sound I loved when I was younger, done so, so well it makes me grin from ear to ear. A list of bands never hurts so if you like OLD groups like Swirlies, Treepeople, Pain Teens, early Medicine, MBV, Sonic Youth, dustDEVILS, St. Johnny, early Afghan Whigs...I'm sure I even heard Siouxsie and the Banshees laced through one track, then this gorgeous racket is yours. So not a brand new sound but I love bendy guitar noise that sounds like abrasive velvet on a stylus and 'Tempest' has lots of this and hooks that glue themselves in yr mind like aural marmite. - Norman Records
Broken Water’s second full-length, Tempest, is at once a deeply competent and unoriginal record. These adjectives, of course, need not indicate that a listener will not derive pleasure from listening to Tempest. The album has moments that inspire — even demand — some head-nodding or hair-tossing; a druggy, decaying guitar effect builds intoxicatingly over the record’s course.
One would be hard-pressed to find a review of Broken Water that does not mention Sonic Youth or their PNW predecessors Unwound, and with good reason. Broken Water culls so extensively from those bands’ sonic vocabularies as to seem, occasionally, redundant: the washes of noise behind a pretty, melancholic melody, the pedal-board, the tom-heavy rhythms, the slow tempos with loud-soft dynamics. The latter might be one of Tempest’s main pitfalls. Almost the entire latter half of the record stays firmly in midtempo mode, and though several of the songs might succeed pulled out of that context, the sequence of “Some Thread to Connect,” “Paranoid,” and “River Under the River” just kind of grinds along.
Broken Water’s Peripheral Star EP, which came out last year, remedied some of these tendencies by virtue of its catchiness. Touches like the “woo-ooo” backing vocals on “Heartstrings” and the thunderous speed and energy with which the band tore through “Stop Means Stop” seemed like a step forward from a fine first LPWhet, which showed a tendency to meander. Here, they’ve grown louder and denser, but somehow, it only serves to remind a listener that she probably hasn’t listened to Evol in a while and wow, that really is a great record.
As a fan of post-punk grunge-side-stepping music of bygone decades, I likeTempest because it’s a fine rendition of a style of music I enjoy, which few guitar rock bands play nowadays; even the firmly established ’90s boom seems to lean more heavily toward the more raging sounds of Dinosaur Jr. and Mudhoney (cf. Milk Music, who profess to hate Mudhoney, Yuck, California X, et al). The three members of Broken Water are such skilled musicians and seem so committed to this particular sound that I hope they continue to tweak it in ways that transcend the nostalgic, as they did on Peripheral Star. “Chantal,” here, seems a step in that direction, though completely different from the EP. It’s a lovely slow ballad that with country-tinged guitar swirls that land somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Opal. Where singer Kanako Pooknyw’s soft vocals sometimes tend toward the monotonous, here she carries a buried melody that plays successfully off the rest of the band. Broken Water is fully capable of growth, and I hope they will build off deft asides like these to create a style they can own fully. - Talya Cooper
The Sonic Youth comparisons stop here. Broken Water tends to garner a lot of comparisons to Sonic Youth, and while their noisy signature sound and alternating male and female vocals can certainly make one recall Goo or EVOL, the band has a definite unique sound that is all its own. Broken Water is a relatively new 3-piece out of Olympia, WA with a few EPs and only one other full-length. Being a fan of their other releases, especially the Whet LP, I picked this up as soon as I found out it had been released. With Tempest, Broken Water has further solidified its place as one of the most important recent indie rock bands in my collection of music.
As with Broken Water’s other releases, Tempest’s production quality is not the highest. However the lo-fi production that Broken Water has seemed to favor on its releases (whether it be because of money or just because they like it, I have no idea) fits the music perfectly. Their unique sound, blending elements of noise rock, grunge, psychedelia and shoegaze, feels absolutely perfect with lo-fi production.
The album’s name is a fitting description for the way it sounds. Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, the album swirls through shoegazey passages, trudges through punishingly sludgy sections and attacks with harsh guitar feedback, accompanied by a strong, talented rhythm section. The bass sound is thick and fierce, and the drummer for the band probably should get his own paragraph about his talents and the energy he plays with. With vocals trading between all 3 members at times, the singing always stays fresh and interesting. The alternating vocals add to the overall feel of psychedelia that is very present on the album.
Tempest in a way plays out like an experience on a high dose of psilocybin mushrooms. It’s chaotic, violent, noisy, crazy, all over the place, and sometimes is just confounding, and it’s over sooner than you feel like it should be. However it leaves the listener feeling refreshed almost, with a subtle feeling of wanting more. - better ask trix
As with Broken Water’s other releases, Tempest’s production quality is not the highest. However the lo-fi production that Broken Water has seemed to favor on its releases (whether it be because of money or just because they like it, I have no idea) fits the music perfectly. Their unique sound, blending elements of noise rock, grunge, psychedelia and shoegaze, feels absolutely perfect with lo-fi production.
The album’s name is a fitting description for the way it sounds. Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, the album swirls through shoegazey passages, trudges through punishingly sludgy sections and attacks with harsh guitar feedback, accompanied by a strong, talented rhythm section. The bass sound is thick and fierce, and the drummer for the band probably should get his own paragraph about his talents and the energy he plays with. With vocals trading between all 3 members at times, the singing always stays fresh and interesting. The alternating vocals add to the overall feel of psychedelia that is very present on the album.
Tempest in a way plays out like an experience on a high dose of psilocybin mushrooms. It’s chaotic, violent, noisy, crazy, all over the place, and sometimes is just confounding, and it’s over sooner than you feel like it should be. However it leaves the listener feeling refreshed almost, with a subtle feeling of wanting more. - better ask trix
Sonic Youth made walls of guitar noise a standalone form of rock. Now, after a quarter-century of evolution—and eventual incorporation into many mainstream styles—detuned distortion has become just another technique in the musical toolbox. Along the way, noise rock lost some of its raw aggression and audacity. On its aptly named sophomore album, Tempest, Olympia, Washington trioBroken Water hits the reset button on the genre, rewinding back to the late-’80s reverb revolution that took hold in its home state.Tempest is droning, it’s heavy, and it’s noisy: Broken Water isn’t trying to sneak in catchy pop riffs, enticing vocal harmonies, or anything else that might interest the casual listener.
With its indiscernible lyrics, psychedelic flourishes, and a preference for volume over melodies, Tempest mostly stays true to noise rock’s pre-grunge-era roots. Highlights like “Drown” and the crunchy jam “Underground” are buried in a landfill of sludge-fuzz, and it takes a little time to dig them out. Only the album’s closer, “When You Said,” sounds like a bridge to accessibility, though even that song eventually detonates with amplifier-exploding fury, obliterating all traces of a pop-friendly hook. While Broken Water’s disinterest in convention is commendable, there isn’t much else in the maelstrom of Tempest grab hold of. If the band isn’t going to pursue melody, it needs to have some other worthwhile destination in mind. Tempest brings the noise, but not much else. - Chris Mincher
|
Peripheral Star (2011)
audio:
Peripheral StarHeart Strings
Many artists seem to refuse to directly acknowledge their influences, as if another outsiders’ ability to quickly perceive an element of a preceding innovation will cheapen what is ostensibly being put forth as “new” and “unique.” While perhaps unintentional, this does seems to create a sense of shame in admitting that a particular idea or style came from somewhere beyond the performers themselves. Olympia’s Broken Water, who unabashedly wear their influences on their sleeves, are clearly indebted to the work of many great 80s and 90s alternative rock innovators. But in their brief existence as a group, they have created an amalgam of sounds that is both confoundingly original and entirely familiar.
Fans of Broken Water’s 2010 debut Whet won’t notice a change in style with the Peripheral Star EP. The group explores similar territory, sure, but not to the album’s detriment. The production remains reverb heavy, albeit slightly clearer, producing a warm and enveloping low end recalling shoegaze acts like The Swirlies. Vocals are traded between the three band members: guitarist Jon Hanna has a laconic, half-spoken vocals reminiscent of J. Mascis and Thurston Moore, while bassist Abby Ingram and drummer Kanako Wynkoop mostly provide ethereal, floating vocals as a counterpoint. Ingram and Wynkoop also take more chances on this EP, including a near-riot grrrl turn on “Stop Means Stop” and an eerie Japanese vocal backdrop to “Okane No.” But, ultimately, Hanna’s guitar playing steals the show in most of the songs. Blasts of dissonant feedback overtake the music at the perfect moments but quickly anchor themselves before nearly fading back into the murky depths of the crawling rhythm section.
While the title track features more than a passing resemblance to Whet’s “Say What’s on Your Mind” in terms of rhythmic structure and dynamics, its bass-driven melody still makes it a great introduction to the group for the uninitiated. “Kansas,” one of the best moments in the group’s live show, translates well on record, a total slow burn with a swelling melodic bottom end and a menacing guitar hanging just under Kanako’s soaring vocals. The song breezes by at just under six minutes; it could easily go on for another ten. “Heart Strings” is quite possibly the most accomplished piece the group has written yet, with a satisfying verge-of-collapse climax that could stand up to some of Unwound’s best moments.
Peripheral Star does suffer from poor sequencing choices — “Okane No” ends the EP abruptly and strangely, leaving a feeling that more should follow (note: the CD version adds the “Normal Never Happened” 7-inch to the end) — and the lyrics, which were surprisingly great when they could be discerned on Whet, are nigh-incomprehensible this time. Still, Broken Water have formed a sort of alternative Million Dollar Man using the best parts of a wide variety of great influences, which is no easy feat these days. As long as they keep releasing material as consistently interesting and remarkable as Peripheral Star, you won’t hear me calling them a cheap imitation of anything. - BRIAN POLSGROVE
As major labels continue to exist behind the times, artists and labels with little capital and lesser reputations are producing some of the most innovative, interesting, and inspiring music. Whether it’s creating a new niche in digital technology or looking to once obsolete formats,Agitated Atmosphere hopes to pull back the curtain on a wealth of sights and sound from luminaries such as Broken Water.
How three-piece Broken Water remains a mystery, even amongst the music-hungry masses of their Pacific Northwest backyard. The Olympian trio blasted open the time machine doors with their critically adored Whet. The joint release of the album -- particularly its exposure to DIY aficionados under the cloak and dagger of premiere Iowa City label Night People -- lent Broken Water an audience it may not have known it had: a group of experimental fans who thirsted for the grunged bliss of yesteryear.
The rebirth of the “alternative” 90s is now well in effect thanks to reunions and reformations. AsWhet set Broken Water’s course toward the late 80s/early 90s confusion of Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth, they eagerly veered off course thanks to the darkly shoegaze of their follow-up 7-inch, “Normal Never Happened” b/w “Faux King Vogue.” Never content to be pinned down by retro references and daring not repeat them, it’s this same attention to challenging themselves that inhabits their latest EP, Peripheral Star.
The pained shoegaze of “Normal Never Happened” finds itself stuffed into a succinct package courtesy of EP opener and title track, “Peripheral Star.” The track isn’t as sprawling as its ancestor but more than makes up for it with a sensual melody and a chainsaw guitar riff. “Okane No” is a playful addition to Broken Water’s repertoire, utilizing a lazy fuzz bass and cute vocal inflection that showcases a band comfortable straddling the lines of experimentalism and pop. “Kansas” and its antithesis, “Stop Means Stop,” are Peripheral Star’s standouts, finding Broken Water doing what they do best: grow. “Kansas” is Whet post-college; slacker streak intact, but a head full of knowledge and a bowing book shelf heavy with sinister ideas and heady reads. “Stop Means Stop” stands on the strength of its brutal yet catchy punk influence.
Why the Pacific Northwest continues to sleep on their very own remains an open question but consider this your chance to check in with before the Sandman’s spell is lifted and everyone’s grogginess becomes wide-eyed devotion. - Justin Spicer
Whet (2010)
In a music world devouring 80s culture like Cheez-Its, the 90s renaissance that’s slowly emerging echoes the transition 20 years ago, slaying bands obsessed with image rather than substance. Buried beneath the pile of reunited alterna-acts lies Broken Water, a band that shares little more than a stripped-down style and a lackadaisical attitude toward attire with their elders. Whet rekindled our love with the 90s without rehashing it. It’s impossible to ignore the hints of no wave, shoegaze, and grunge that dot Whet, but admit it: The world has been in desperate need of rock ’n’ roll. Everyone is dressing up or dressing down their music in an attempt to fit a mold, to find their niche; Whet challenged us to stand on our own, like what we like, and to hell with the naysayers. Bring on the Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and MBV comparisons, because Broken Water will not only rise to meet them, but will exceed them with a charm and style all their own. They are not slaves to the past, but preservers of the big riff. - Jspicer www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2010-favorite-50-albums-2010
In a music world devouring 80s culture like Cheez-Its, the 90s renaissance that’s slowly emerging echoes the transition 20 years ago, slaying bands obsessed with image rather than substance. Buried beneath the pile of reunited alterna-acts lies Broken Water, a band that shares little more than a stripped-down style and a lackadaisical attitude toward attire with their elders. Whet rekindled our love with the 90s without rehashing it. It’s impossible to ignore the hints of no wave, shoegaze, and grunge that dot Whet, but admit it: The world has been in desperate need of rock ’n’ roll. Everyone is dressing up or dressing down their music in an attempt to fit a mold, to find their niche; Whet challenged us to stand on our own, like what we like, and to hell with the naysayers. Bring on the Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and MBV comparisons, because Broken Water will not only rise to meet them, but will exceed them with a charm and style all their own. They are not slaves to the past, but preservers of the big riff. - Jspicer www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2010-favorite-50-albums-2010
Built from the ruins of OlyWa outfit Sisters (sounds like the screaming guy is gone), Broken Water retains the services of psychopharmacological image consultants to an ideal of indie rock once owned by fashionplate Sonic Youth or chainsmoking Unwound, right down to the vocals. If you ever heard Sisters, you probably came in expecting this, a band from Olympia, picking up the torch of the burly, fuzzily-remembered late ‘80s/early ‘90s flannel explosion from roundabout that way. Broken Water certainly possesses the required atmosphere to get there in a hurry, with eight songs that balance things we know with a homespun, accepting feel throughout, like getting to hide out, smoke cloves, and draw shoegaze band logos on your backpack in the art studio throughout all of junior year, or finding your own secluded oasis in nature before some asshole comes along and deposits a soiled copy of Swank and an empty halfrack there. Heaviness and noise are well-balanced with syrupy vocal harmonies, and an overall moldy weirdness that suits them better than you’d expect. The album’s running order is a bit lopsided, with the stranger songs taking up a bit more space than they otherwise would, but several listens in and I find their willingness to experiment here and there quite redemptive, bolstered by the right kind of studio grit (handily applied by Capt. Trips, who did up the Sex Vid records). Parts of this sound like they would fit right at home somewhere between Evol and the first Dinosaur record, which is where a portion of my own tastes were developed, so pardon my bias – if you liked the ‘90s, welcome back. Can’t wait to hear what they do next. There’s a beautiful, hand-screened test pressing version of 100 copies, and the regular release version, which doesn’t look nearly as nice. Still though, highly recommended to teenagers and those over 30, as well as select twentysomethings. (http://www.raccoo-oo-oon.org/np) - Doug Mosurock
Tucked within the psychedelic and synthetic lo-fi of Shawn Reed's Night People label is an album that is as much an anomaly to the label as it is a sibling to it in its reimagining of classic sounds. Broken Water, a trio from Olympia, Washington, tap into their region's roots to dig up the blue collar crunch of a past as quickly forgotten as it was widely embraced. Whet touches every stepping stone of grunge without falling into the tar pit of predictability, not only proving rock and roll is still a powerful genre but that it can be as weird and untamed as the bands that call Night People home.
Whet is an unapologetic blast from grunge's past. The album spills over with the distorted crunch once recognized as the Northwest's calling card. Yet nothing created by Broken Water seems disingenuous, rather Whet is perhaps the most authentic artifact of an era gone by from a new generation that couldn't give a damn about what once stood where grunge's tombstone now casts its shadow. The touchstones of Broken Water are immediate and the wave of nostalgia that initially greets the ears is soon surrendered with the band's own spin on the blue collar music of the '80s and early '90s.
Album opener "Say What's On Your Mind" takes a cue from Northwestern neighbor, Phil Elverum. Combining the black wooden push and pull with a lazy Dinosaur Jr. melody, the track is both catchy and ferocious. That old crick in your neck from your headbanging days is bound to ache after the song has run its course. The mix of unhinged urgency and stoner cool that permeates "Say What's On Your Mind" seeps into the roots of Whet as it crawls deeper into the forests and mountains of the Northwest. "Dead Light" is a sleepy bong hit after a night of second shift shit and your last call bourbon has left you with little energy for anything else but slumber.
The comfortable juxtaposition of mellow vibes with loud guitars and pounding drums is one that is as old as time but Broken Water's take is surprisingly fresh. With the spotlight returning to the Northwest in the face of reunions and rediscoveries, Broken Water proves able to carve their own niche without relying on a scene revival. Rather, the trio from Olympia seems poised to take the scraps of old and build a style anew—away from hot lights, designer suits, and the A&R buffet. - Justin Spicer
Broken Water reminds me of the first time I heard the intro to Sonic Youth’s “Brother James”, all stunned and fascinated on my bedroom floor, and decided that this band was the best band, the only band as far I was concerned. Whet makes me want to watch1991: The Year Punk Broke and draw in my notebook. It makes me want to smear fire-engine Wet ‘N Wild gloss on my lips, play a bass guitar for the first time, stick the insert cards fromExperimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star to my wall with masking tape. It makes me want to be 15 again, because this album is 100%, absolutely what my 15 felt like.
That’s just me, though. Whet isn’t adolescent by nature, and Broken Water aren’t so cartoonishly retro. The Olympia trio—formed from the ashes of Sisters and joined by a member of Congratulations—strike a balance between straight Dinosaur Jr. worship, Unwound’s heavy post-hardcore and the watery moan of guitars tuned, detuned, distorted and fazed; but they also have something distinctly them, a seasick thing, the way Kanako’s, Abigail’s and Jon’s voices warble together in unsettling, sweet-to-saccharine harmonies, that owes as much to no-wave of years past as it does the most modern bedroom punk.
But even the best memories go a little flat. Whet is an album you can’t hear without desperately needing to hear the things that spawned it: You’re Living All Over Me goes on next, then Sisterand any combo of the late 80s/early 90s bands responsible for pioneering this crunchy, crawly Pacific Northwest vibe. Still, Broken Water aren’t a band to be missed; you’ll get to the originals in a few minutes. Whet is worth the wait. - mishkanyc.com/
Broken Water Art
» Olympia's Broken Water drops two things in May: Seaside & Sedmikrasky, and Tempest.
Broken Water has been working on two records, Tempest, which will come out May 29th on Hardly Art, and Seaside and Sedmikrasky, which they hope to release on May 1st.
Guitarist Jon Hanna, who painted the cover for Tempest, says the art is a loose impression of a picture of an LSD tripping room from Life Magazine, 1966. I saw the specks of a rainbow but I wouldn't have thought. The imploding, burgeoning color-repitition fits the band's noisy drone. “It had been about 5 years or so since I did any real painting and we needed to come up with some artwork for this record so I took a stab at it,” says Hanna, “Abby [Ingram] and Kanako [Pooknyw] did most of the artwork for all our previous records and it seemed as good a time as any to get back into visual art.” The LP also holds collaborative hand-written lyric-inserts and drawings by the band.
the choice of inserting hand-written things:
Kanako: We tend to focus on the instrumentation of the compositions and a majority of our songs do not have lyrics the first few days we step into the studio. Wild, huh? Stan Wright, audio engineer for Tempest (as well as Peripheral Star and Seaside and Sedmikrasy), laughed at us because the three of us were arguing over who has to write lyrics and sing on the songs. Stan shared a story about 36 Mafia recording down the hall from his back in Memphis, their engineer demanding that they leave their guns with the receptionist because they kept drawing them on each other fighting who got to rap to what song. I guess we have the opposite issue.
Anyway, my whole point with this tangent is that all these slips of random paper we scrounged up in the studio or out of Abby’s bag to scribble lyrics down on very last min...I collected them because I thought it would be cool to see them all together. When our label encouraged us to include lyrics it seemed like our pile of scribbles best represented where we were in the process while we recorded these songs. When Abby was laying out the lyrics insert she included the drawings that Jon, Abby and I made after we finished the record while brainstorming record cover ideas for Tempest. My drawing is the self portrait, Jon's is the hand petting a cat.
the closing track, when you said (you can listen to the opening,drown, below):
Jon: I wrote the music for "When You Said" sometime last summer (2011) wanting to catch the heavy mid-tempo vibe of some of the songs off our first record, Whet. The words I didn't write until the day of the NUTS! #8 zine release show in September where we performed it. They're based on some stuff that was going on for me at the time, but like most of my lyrics I tried to make them just ambiguous enough so anyone could have their own personal interpretation.
the billion-dollar question: are the songs in the record the same thing without the album art?
Jon: I think the songs definitely stand on their own without the artwork, but that's not to say that I'd be happy just slapping some random picture on the cover and saying, 'Done!' The painting is more of a complimentary piece to songs and I think it works pretty well conveying a 'tempest.' Actually, I think the songs on the record are what really give the artwork itself meaning.
tempest comes from thoughts on “russian punk-rock poets, the ocean, drowning, the occupy movement, touring, nightmares, dreams, memories, and so on.
Abby: I hope people like it, but part of what's really special about sharing music that you make with other people is the variety of response and personal associations. I don't have a rigid view on how I want this to be seen or heard, just like I don't want to be told how to feel/hear/see things. I feel like a lot of the content (for my part at least) was personally fueled by nightmares/dreams, and the disintegration of reality and the questioning of memories as fictional and archetypal. That is where I’m coming from. So it's very loose. I do hope you hear an expression that sounds new. I don't like to think about being boring or redundant. But that's part of my human ego, too. Be bored if you are!
As for Seaside & Sedmikrasky, the band wants you to help them release it. Seaside is based on the book "In The Realm of the Hungry Ghost" by Dr. Gabor Mate andSedmikrasky is a tribute to Vera Chytilová’s badass Czech New Wave from the sixties; a psychedelic explosion in itself with a series of surreal episodes of two young girls, and keleidoscope colors and cuts. You can watch the movie here.
"We were riding a magical wave to Psychodelia (that is a real place) when we recorded this. It was fun! We were bad! I play upright piano and drums, Abby plays guitar and Jon stumbled into the room at one point and picked up a bass. That music will never happen again... I don't think we could pull it off if we tried. I'm glad I managed to record it and that it will be released into the world," says Pooknyw.
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar