Sunday, December 11, 2016
Lync - (1994) These Are Not Fall Colors CS
Fall Colors' scope and sprawl is almost staggering, especially coming from a band of such ostensible slackers. Cemented together with ragged, ambient loops of spoken-word samples and guitar feedback, the album's 10 tracks swell and collapse in spasms of alternating beauty, confusion, joy, and skull-scraping noise. The opener "B" starts out with an arpeggio off-kilter enough to make Sonic Youth or Unwound proud, then busts into one of Jayne's garbled couplets about bubble baths and killing one's cereal. The album's formula of jangling discord, hooks, and screams reveals itself in the chorus, a pissed, bleary-eyed passage that sounds like a sloppy fistfight between three stoned paranoiacs at 4 a.m.
From there, the cassette just gets prettier and crazier: "Perfect Shot" is the type of sing-along that could leave people coughing up blood, while "Silverspoon Glasses" manages to sound frantic and lazy at the same time. "Clay Fighter" and "Cue Cards" are back-to-back anthems covered in scabs and haunted by a vague yet aching specter of loss. The album's second half is dominated by "Angelfood Fodder And Vitamins," whose noodly, delicate intro would trickle down to a million emo bands, and the closer "Uberrima Fides," a near-seven-minute sprawl of loosely spooled riffs and corrosive chants ending in an epic guitar expedition. It's clear that Lync also took a lot of inspiration from Drive Like Jehu and the early '90s Dischord Records roster, but where those groups strove to be mechanistically tight, Lync was messily human. Jayne carried this quality to his next project, Sub Pop signee Love As Laughter, which has had its share of high points, though it's never approached the humble hugeness of Fall Colors.
Tracklist (split into side A & B, not individual tracks)
A1 B
A2 Perfect Shot
A3 Silver Spoon Glasses
A4 Pennies To Save
A5 Clay Fighter
B1 Cue Cards
B2 Angelfood Fodder And Vitamins
B3 Heroes And Heroines
B4 Turtle
B5 Uberrima Fides
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