The Icarus Line
Mono
Crank!
As evidenced by their Mono debut full-length, The Icarus Line are a difficult one to pin down. One minute, they’re bashin’ n’ skronkin’ away like prime Pussy Galore or Honeymoon Killers, getting all tricky like mathcore progenitors Drive Like Jehu during the other, and yet another one, stumbling around in a dark, drug-addled dirge that’d make Nick Cave and his early Bad Seeds proud • and then, more often than not, all in the same song • rendering Mono a sum of easily identifiable long-lost influences that altogether are much more Now than Then. However, The Icarus Line are infinitely more than a three-trick pony of disparate joints, more than a mere musical signifier for such vaguely defined genre-parameters as “noisecore” or “post-punk” (yeah, I know I’m quite fond of the latter term • piss off), the foremost reason being the quintet’s knack for coke-dusted melody (Polvo, maybe?), the secondary one being the neurotic, all-akimbo urgency proffered on this 12-song smear-fest. It rocks, and dynamically and distinctively, at that. And, really, that’s all you need to know at this point, so “Feed a Cat to Your Cobra,” already.
Crank!, 8571 Higuera St., Los Angeles, CA 90232; http://www.crankthis.com
