Toronto’s New FriesNew Fries released their album Is The Idea Of Us via Telephone ExplosionTelephone Explosion.
Unique album that is filled with indie lo-fi dark art-rock and no wave music.
About the album:
Much of this record sounds and reflects on this in-between.
It’s anxious in its repetitions and unsure of genre.
It rejects a singular character or emotion and attempts to instead act as a container for many.
Anni’s lyrics state this directly: “it lacks a mood, it lacks definition” / “curiosity beyond expectation”. Her lyrics describe the spaces, objects, people, and situations that embody an in-between—her grandfather who worked as medium, the ecology of the foreshore, Mount Tambora’s eruption in 1816 that produced the Year Without a Summer, and mesh (the fabric).
The result is a collage of 6 songs and many otherwise quick ideas.
Much of this collage was testament to the work of engineer/musician Carl Didur. Carl (Zacht Automaat, formerly U.S. Girls) is a long-standing pillar of Toronto’s experimental music community.
He is also a tape expert, which they knew these songs needed entering the recording process as mostly bare grooves.
The result was less that of hiring an engineer than it was working with a collaborator.
His musical ideas are all over this record.
Is the Idea of Us is the situation of musicians/non-musicians making music together perhaps completely illegible in the music on this record and to the random listener who doesn’t know our story in South Bend, Indiana (how did you find us?!) But with this title we name this absurd gesture, through our changing relationship to making music both as a unit and as individuals.
There are enough bands out there; they insist on do it differently.
Is The Idea Of Us gets:
/10.
