Coffinberry
"From Now On Now" CDEP
Morphius Records
Genres: garage rock, indie rock
Morphius
PO Box 13474
Baltimore MD
21203
April 2006 |
The cover art does not prepare you at all for what this quartet does
on From Now On Now, an EP of messy, disgruntled garage-rock
sounding something like The Strokes and French Kicks
filtered through a car accident. No joke, this is tight modern indie
rock with every element just slightly off-kilter, be it the lovingly
out-of-tune, grimy vocals or the noisy, ever-so-slightly discordant
guitar chords. "Eva," for example, reminds me strongly of The
French Kicks - but the guitars are too cutting, the sound too
messy and chaotic... and while words like "messy" and "discordant" are
often used to put music down, here it puts Coffinberry ahead of
their predecessors, formulating a unique and very successful sound of
its own. The plodding "Nightlife" is one of my favourite moments on
the record; every line seems like a nearly insurmountable effort for
singer Nicholas Cross, while the careless guitar work adds an
even more dire mood to the mix. "Seven Months Gone By," meanwhile,
sees the band living up to its Strokes/Walkmen comparisons,
while the mesmerizing hooks of "Cruise Control Psycho" and "Oh Elise"
make them the most viable singles on the record. If Coffinberry
can keep this up and even - SHOCK! - improve, they're gonna have one
helluva career ahead of them. MP3s (from
coffinberry.net):
Cruise Control Psycho,
Seven Months Gone By
87%
Matt Shimmer
[Vitals: 7 tracks, distributed by
the label, released 2005] |
