a faulty chromosome
as an ex-anorexic’s six sicks exit…
self-released
What could be better than shoegazing drone? Mmmm, nothing? No, let me think. Toy drone! The instantly likable a faulty chromosome craft a ramshackle and bratty, homemade drone that sounds like Spacemen 3 if they had a fucking slingshot in their back pocket. Yep. So yeah, little pocket-sized sonic art projects dominate the whole of as an ex-anorexic’s… but it’s not what you think, all overly cutesy and earnest. This shit is utterly charming and individual, like a collaged zine, but communicated in sounds; it’s a threadbare recasting of all the fearlessness and hooks and sense of self-possession inherent in the best of early British postpunk and new wave.
“Them Pleasures of the Flesh” has the same battered, bruised majesty of early New Order demos, simple guitar lines join forces with buzzing synths and weary, almost elegant vocal harmonizing for something that’s much more than the simple sum of its parts. “What” is a thing of strange and tender beauty, beginning with a bouncy xylophone line coupled with found recordings of a baby gurgling and sputtering, and then the drum machine, organ, and broken guitar unobtrusively phase in, sounding nearly as primitive and unselfconscious as the child’s “singing.” And check out the singer’s lazy drawl, making up playground rhythms on the spot, with his bandmates chiming in, with calls of “What do you want,” alien doo-wop style – it’s a blissed out, minimalist creep with a long, wonderful coda of everything falling apart, until it’s just the baby again.
The peppy zip and tumble of “The Loneliness of the Short Distance Runner” is way more invigorating than it has any right to be, with the falling-down-stairs guitar solo, the classic chorus tossed out casually at the end, down to the Smiths-y chime of the rhythms. Sometimes you’re almost like, “Fuck, this is toy orchestra Field Mice or Suicide’s Second Album or Seventeen Seconds,” but I’m glad they keep the scale purposely small and homemade, school play instead of major motion picture, everything doesn’t have to be for everyone, ya dig? There can be so much happiness and nuance found in cheap sonics.
So if you can listen past the static, the clicks and pops and ringing, fizzling guitar amps, and buried vocal wonder, you’ll be fucking amply rewarded. What, you want everything handed to you?
a faulty chromosome: http://www.myspace.com/afaultychromosome
