Dads – “Brown On Brown” – [Wharf Cat Records]

Thurston Hunger   8/3/2015   12-inch, A Library

Floored in Florida, echoplex whirpool, voices smeared
on the walls of your eardrums. Guitars. bitter and bracing,
thin, high pitched strings piercing the clouds of production
here. So, yeah great stuff. Songs stretched out, sometimes
brought back from the dead. Stacks of guitars, noisier
than most “noise pop.” I get the feeling Carson Cox and
David Vassalotti just don’t like to end songs. Although they
did manage to squeeze 5-ish songs into these two sides.
“Disco Dad” gets a reprise at the end of Side A, it has a
riff that would have made a good alternative to the Jaws
theme. On the flip side “I’m Still Mad” lasts for a few brown
bag huffs and cheap cigarette puffs, before their epic
“Ride the Moon into the Sun” which is sort of dirty psych
rock. Or is it is sort of a Terry Riley goes punk number
with space kraut flavor? The best thing about this release
is its willful messiness. And that includes the confused
booklet, with imagined battles versus a corporate shoe
company who want to call the album “Young Man Dancing
Pumps.” The automatic writing hits on the lousy nature of
rock camps and includes crumbs of Doritos. I see know
these two are part of a band called “Merchandise” (on 4AD
even, hmmmm I’ll check out samples). Maybe these Dads
are no more, and maybe they’ve grown up and lost their
madness and method of taking themselves simultaneouslynot seriously and (faux?) solipsistically super-seriously,
as befits a young man’s pumped-up diary! They did this
in 2011 when we were all a lot younger, stupider and
happier. In an ideal world the band would have ended
when they cranked up their home-made laser light show
to these mighty messy jams.
-Thurston Hunger