Eat Skull
Wild and Inside
Rating: 3.0
Label: Slitbreeze
Girls are just the most prominent. Slitbreeze’s Tom Lax dubbed some of these bands “shit gaze.” It’s a funny but somewhat limiting term and also ignores that for as long as rock has existed, there have been hundreds of garage/basement/punk bands who made records that sounded cheap and crappy. Hell, listen to some old blues and folk albums sometime. Like one-time label mates Times New Viking, Portland’s Eat Skull cover their short, scrappy, sometimes melodic pop songs in a thick layer of fuzz and hiss. The music often sounds as if were recorded with a Fisher Price tape recorder and a mic. At times it feels like a battle between pop instincts and grungy cheap-ass recording techniques, which is part of what makes these bands interesting.
On their second album Wild and Inside, Eat Skull evoke classic 1990s indie rock bands like Pavement, Sebadoh, Royal Trux and, of course, Guided by Voices. Like the now-iconic Guided by Voices, if you don’t like a song, just wait, since it will be over quickly. Most songs here are spit out in two-minute bites. “Stick to the Formula” is a fuzzy burst of muffled vocals and vaguely British Invasion rock that could be a top down driving anthem, provided your engine is about to overheat. There is some diversity to the album though, especially the longest song, the borderline Dylan-titled “Talkin’ Bro in the Wall Blues,” which exists in a druggy, psychedelic haze. There are also punk nuggets with pig-squeal guitars (“Nuke Mecca”) and broke-down acoustic songs (“Who’s in Control?”). The latter has loose group vocals and is kind of the anti-folk version of the subway busker’s blues.
It’s refreshing to see Eat Skull and bands like them take inspiration from the wilder, messier side of indie, as too many contemporary indie bands are in the mellow Death Cab/Shins/O.C. soundtrack mode. As exhilaratingly shambling as Wild and Inside is, it does raise the question of where the band can go from here. Most of the group’s predecessors and contemporaries like No Age and the Thermals quickly evolved from their lo-fi roots. Regardless, Eat Skull are worth following.
by Lukas Sherman
