FOLIO
by Chris Williams
Label: Saddle Creek
Release Date: July 7, 2009
I didn’t trust this band when I first saw their name. Now, I think I may trust them even less. They are shape shifters, genre benders, a love child of Bjork and the bald dude from Les Savy Fav. They must have studied the avant garde, come to the conclusion that they embody the bourgeoisie, and set out to destroy themselves. They make me want to break out all of the modern art references I learned in college. The four piece from Lincoln Nebraska takes inspiration from some of the most disparate musical sources and has repackaged them into an extremely dynamic, sometimes soothing, sometimes arresting album.
The band is built on a very strong rhythm section, but its clear that this exists in service of the lead guitar and vocals. What we hear in the music is tension between beauty and ugliness, crazy high or low pitched guitar riffs and a voice that can shift from balmy to shrieking in an instant. Teal Gardner’s voice sometimes sounds childish, sometimes professional, has great range, transitions perfectly into falsetto, and I think she has perfect pitch because she can deliberately bend into and out of dissonant 1/4 step tones. The lead guitar aids the vocals with creepy melodies, or rhythmic outbursts of dissonance. But, it also functions as the rhythm guitar, so it’s sparse, sometimes startling lead riffs stand in contrast to the beautiful, almost jazzy background playing featured throughout.
The eponymous album begins dramatically; scant ambient noise, a beautiful voice singing a strange rhythm. After about a minute, the guitar comes in with a sweeping violent riff, straight out of the Young Widows playbook. The sound is alarming, loud, high pitched, metal, you reach to turn down the volume a little bit, but promptly turn it back up. The band has mastered the dynamic shift. In almost every song, there is a quiet point with only the voice and a high hat to keep time, followed by a hard part that is often like a bastardized Deerhoof, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs – complete with the high pitch sentence-ending shrieks.
The list of influences attributed to this band is enormous. Like a Rorschach inkblot test, this album is amorphous, and allows every listener a crack at that favorite critic’s game – hyphenated genre creation. UUVVWWZ definitely lives up to their self defined rubric and deserve their early critical success. But the band is trying to confuse you. They are trying to make you think that punk-jazz is a real genre, that mash ups are avant garde. The truth is, a band like this is bound to excite the wordy tongues of music critics, but they are not for everybody. And they are going to have a hell of a time trying to write a second album.
Follow FOLIO!