Tone
“Ambient Metals”
(Dischord)
Instrumentals. It can be tough to get into them, especially when they fall into the post-punk/post hardcore/three-guitars-riffing-and-noodling-at-once category. These six guys, longtime members of the D.C. scene, capture fragments of the Fugazi/Jawbox guitar sound, but this six-song ep still falls way flat. The biggest offender has to be the ridiculously repetitive nine minutes of “Steppe,” that build to nowhere.
Oh, but wait. There’s an unnamed track (tangent: I never really understood the purpose of naming instrumentals anyway) at 4:33 after the last track. Nevermind, that one’s weary, too. With former members of Government Issue and Unrest plus ubiquitous D.C. producer J. Robbins (formerly of Burning Airlines and Jawbox) on the knobs, one expects a little more. Unfortunately it’s forgettable experimental guitar orchestrations with only the slightest hints of psychedelia.
Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t blow as much as, say, Iceburn’s overindulgent jazzcore adventure “Hephaestus.” It’s ten times better than that disaster, but still much less than truly experimental instrumentals like Black Flag’s “The Process of Weeding Out.”
