Wooden Indian Burial Ground – “Wooden Indian Burial Ground” – [Mon Amie Records]

Thurston Hunger   6/24/2013   12-inch, A Library

Behold the retrosexual…a garage cloudy with reverb, sleeves
rolled up to store doo wop cigarettes, choruses of prom queen
deserters (on A2) or drunk neanderthals (on A3). Nice oddball
excursions of keyboards, farfisa for frenzy or dig the electro
piano meandering out of A3 into A4 while a echoplex wormwhole
flits about. The basic, rock and roll primitive structure will
appeal to many, but the peculiar breaks or even breakdowns in
songs are what I dig about this Portland project. They allow
plenty of room for sloppiness, the lines that draw the melodies
are pretty tight, but there’s plenty of space to color outside
of them. Thee Oh Sees may pop up on your retro-radar, and
Justin Fowler hits some of those kinda Dwyer-esque hiccup
yelps at times, and at times you hear that big buzzing
E-string on some dirty pawnshop guitar slapping a song or
two in the ass, like the intro to “White Bats” and during
“Crows.” “Crows” also features a nice whiplassh trade-off
between vocals and guitar, but then after 1.5 minutes that
all disappears for a minute of keyboard cotton candy and
then a screech and back into boogie down slap guitar with
psych leads scorching for another minute before the pink
fluffy sounds return. “Helicopter” the lead off cut does
that too, and was the killer piece for me. The closer
dabbles in sci-fi effects. -Thurston Hunger