Dear and Glorious Physician
Dear and Glorious Physician
New Granada
Now HERE’S something to make me stand up and take some fucking civic pride in being a Florida resident. A four-piece of brothers and sisters from the family Westfall — they’re like the White Stripes, if the family gimmick was glorious reality, times bloody two! Or the Danielson Famile with true blood ties! I smell a publicity/marketing hook here, but who needs shit like that when the fucking music is dandy? Breathing some much needed urgency into the tired “indie rock” aesthetic, these Gainesville-based (ah ha, I knew it was gonna happen someday!) siblings bring the noise and the noir with a twitching, anxious, ALIVE take on post-punk indie geetar noizzzzzze. Who will you hear hints of? Pixies, Velvet Underground, Wire, Go Betweens, the MIGHTY Prolapse. The male vocalist sounds like a cross between Glenn Danzig and the dude from Smoking Popes, the female has the market cornered on icy distance. The music surely ain’t reinventing the wheel, it’s just having a fuck of a lot of a fun smashing the wheel to pieces and then stomping on those pieces until you see the ghost of the wheel rising up to heaven with wings and a harp, and then they shoot that ghost with a shotgun. Natch. The guitars roar, the bass and drums are telepathic and martial in their lockstep. The recording is spare and dry, reminds me of PJ Harvey, where all instruments have enough space to wander and breathe and shake wildly without bumping up into some synthetic blahbadeeblah. And the songwriting is whip smart and wild-eyed. “Behold the Man” quotes a few lines of “When the Saints Go Marching In” before all instruments go into surf freakout mode. Boy/girl vocal interplay is superb and used judiciously. “Malcangrejos” brings the menace like a Latin version of Neu! or Dick Dale or the Shadows or somesuch.
Songs blur by; there’s no time to breathe or hesitate. “Frenzy (What Happened Then)” is a masterclass in the old standby quiet/loud dynamic – the frenetic underpinning of nervous drums and bass drives the song like an outta control roadster — using the girl vocalist to punctuate lines is greatness too. “White Leather/Gold Record” is an unbearably cool turn of phrase too. It all sounds like it’s bursting at the seams to communicate. Good. If they don’t end up hating each other and self-destructing during their first big tour, we might have ourselves a winner.
New Granada: http://www.newgranada.com
