Sic Alps
A Long Way Round To A Shortcut
Animal Disguise
The far reaching arm of the internet has empowered the music listening public but changed the way we listen to and experience this music. One of the casualties is the emergence of a 'local scene' and the excitement of feeling like you are one of a select few that is hearing this music hasn't been felt by many for a long time. For a while now L.A. club The Smell has been the epicenter of a small genre commonly known as 'shitgaze' - a lo-fi punk rock sound often drowned in noise and scuzz. The main players are No Age, Abe Vagoda, and this band - Sic Alps. To make it easy for us this side of the pond, guitarist Mike Donovan and drummer Matthew Donovan have compiled the story so far in one nice easy 26 track album gathering together together all their 7' and 12' releases since 2006.
Arranged in reverse chronological order A Long Way Round To A Short Cut puts its best foot forward with stripped down garage rock occupying most of the first half. Songs like Message From The Law and Bells (With Tremelo And Destortion) serve up a solution of dirt covered blues riffs with murky vocals. They rattle with tinny, DIY production and rumble with basslines so wrapped up in fuzz they play out like month-old cheese. It's not until we get to the halfway point of RATROQ that this record changes course. It's a course that you'd be able to see coming but RATROQ marks the shift and downward plummet into the avant-guard noise creations that this band started with. It's like A Love Supreme being put through a bandsaw and it continues on from there with Social Strats and I Am Grass (Restored) following suit.
So from the hiss-soaked blues rock of the latest singles, Sic Alps take us on a back-track through their short but conscientious career through the squinting screech of their feed-back faze and finishing up with the 2006 releases that adopted a kind of stoner-rock lethargy but with added grime. The latest releases are undoubtedly more palatable but the early 8-Track recordings are essential listening when trying to understand this band and the scene they belong in.
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24th Sep 2008 - Tumblr
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