The Nein
Luxury
Sonic Unyon
Honestly I don’t have much frame of reference for Luxury by The Nein. What begins as indie emo rock that sounds common enough quickly spirals into an otherworldly sci-fi experiment into avant-garde post-punk dance music. The credit for such a bizarre change of direction is The Nein’s newest band member, Dale Flattum, whose dabbling with sounds, samplers and tape decks was previously heard on Steel Pole Bath Tub recordings.
Flattum’s manipulation of noise, which at times can sound like distorted video game bleeps and blips, is a distraction whose absence would leave The Nein as merely just another indie rock band too mundane to mention, but this isn’t to say that these distractions are any less, well, distracting. Mostly they just add some light texture, but at the album’s centerpiece lies “Ennio,” a short instrumental work so haunting and spaghetti western in tone that it could easily fit nicely into the score for Tarantino’s next masterpiece. The song is so perfect, in fact, that it sticks out like a sore thumb on an album that otherwise fails to reach such moments of beauty as in those 2 minutes and 18 seconds in the midst of all the noise.
Sonic Unyon: http://www.sonicunyon.com
