Spresso

Pretty Penny Slur

Genre: INDIE / ALTERNATIVE

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

Alpha Maid and Mica Levi keep it short and crispy on this new Spresso set, building on their run of foggy, grunge-bent EPs and laying out a clear manifesto. 'Pretty Penny Slur' is the duo's battered take on punk: it's loose-limbed, snotty and rough-edged, but assembled from ritualistic coiled riffs and tilted, basement-strength beats. Next level biz as expected - one for fans of Moin, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Loop or the Melvins.

If you look at Levi and Alpha Maid's Spresso EPs as research and development, picking thru the bones of post-punk, slacker rock, hardcore and '90s indie, then 'Pretty Penny Slur' is the fruit of their labor. At just under 20-minutes, arguably a perfect length for this kinda thing, spread over 16 tracks that hitch themselves to a unifying raw groove. Alpha Maid's amp-slashed fretwork is front and center, while Levi provides brittle rhythms and vanishing production tricks; they're a power duo of sorts, and the record comes off like a dirt rock private press discovery that's been tweaked into an uncanny, expressionistic blur of DIY punk, post-and mucky avant-rock. If you need a comparison, it's like Loop's deconstructed, sardonic early experiments infused with The Jesus and Mary Chain's blunt energy - Spresso's a "proper band", they just skew to the left.

Opening with a brief, Melvins-like gurgle of sharp, distorted riffs, they get things moving more earnestly on 'it badly hurt their shoulder', repeating a three note chug into heady, hypnotic intensity. Jump cutting as if they're recording directly to tape, Levi and Alpha Maid push the tempo on 'the injury that left them unable to complete', letting boxy drums propel the wiry feedback squall. Levi's engineering tricks aren't fully obvious at first; they scalpel the track to upset the rhythm when you least expect it, splicing in errors that hiccups thru the material worryingly uncomfortably. You sense something's off, but only when fully zeroing in do you catch the subterfuge. There's the junkyard rattle of 'they started a relationship with a millionaires wife', the sludgy, cannily detuned 'who they loved deeply', the pensive, Slint-like 'playing happy families when he's out', and the grotty 'the day they got caught stealing a necklace'. Everything falls in line thanks to the duo's attention to DIY detail: the sounds are the same (just like the drums held fast on Tirzah's 'Trip9love'), but the arrangements pitch them into different shapes every couple of minutes.

The brief, gristle-free album sounds like a way for Alpha Maid and Levi to stare nostalgia directly in the face. There's a sense that they're pining for simpler times, but not ignoring the shrill din of the contemporary world; in that, we get a grinding commentary that's unashamedly boisterous, and cryptically topical.

MP3 Release (16)