Birds of Avalon
Uncanny Valley
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Label: Volcom Entertainment
Birds of Avalon have opened for a number of well-beloved bands who give the love right back: Ted Leo, the Hold Steady and Mudhoney are a few. It's one thing for a phalanx of blog critics to go nutty over a particular artist or band, but when musicians start speaking in tongues, you know it's time to pay attention. Recorded entirely on analog equipment, the Raleigh, North Carolina quintet's sophomore Uncanny Valley is a record whose pleasures aren't necessarily obvious on the first listen. Keep listening.
While on paper a psych rock band, the Birds don't rely solely on tired shtick to get all otherworldly on our asses. Illusory temporal displacement on Uncanny Valley is provided by the (married!) guitarists Cheetie Kumar and Paul Siler. With the intro of "Unkaany Valley" and the "Astronomy Domine "-like cascading of "Side Two" out of the way, the remaining songs present moments of guitar manna that sound simultaneously good-natured and frightening.
"I Never Knew" floats along with both channels featuring guitars dryly stumbling over the riff before a variety of fuzz and Leslie speaker effects take the listener worlds away. "Your Downtime is Up" reminds me of the spacious disjointedness of Pere Ubu and here, the bass seems to be the main ingredient holding the song together while the guitars comment sourly on the singer's excursion into a tunnel, before the song fades out with a double-tracked delirious guitar figure you wish would play on and on and on.
"Dadcage" arrives next, the first of two analog-synth explorations, along with "Last Rites (Funky Slide)," that provide a kind of relief to the six-stringed weirdness that pervades most of the album. Things don't stay quietly trippy for long, as "Eyesore" kicks in, sounding like a dark acid-drenched version of the incidental music used in episodes of "Kids in the Hall." The weirdness mentioned above reaches what could be a fever pitch on the absurdly titled "Student Teaching." Built around the phrase "Yes I did enjoy myself/ I really had a fine time," the Birds' riffing is tense, resolutely odd and quicker than anything else on the record. "Spirit Nature" sounds oddly like a straight-ahead metal dirge, yet ends with a bizarrely affecting string coda that plays with the listener's expectations as well as Faith No More at their best. It shouldn't be Kumar and Siler that get the entirety of the credit, however. Drummer Scott Nurkin sounds every bit as ludicrously focused on "Student Teaching" and on "Peregrinations," his kit sounds thick yet limber, his hits sounding like a series of fuzzy rocks skipping across water.
It's these exciting moments and sounds that make Uncanny Valley stand out. In the end, it's hard to see the forest for these individual trees; the album is not a collection of strong songs so much as it is a sampler of whacked-out guitar rock that actually sounds fresh. Should the Birds of Avalon find the songwriting chops to match their analogotherworldiness, they could be unstoppable.
by Chris Middleman