Mini-album from retro band.
After spotting the description 'avant rock' on the press release and a glowing review from Thurston Moore, the king of meanderingly pretentious albums, I'm reluctant to even get started with MV & EE's mini album, with backing band The Bummer Road. The opening track is essentially exactly what you'd expect, a mass of fuzzy guitars, relaxed vocals and lyrics about smoking joints, rather apt of course given the title 'East Mountain Joint'. The design of the sleeve, appearance and style of the band and the themes on display in addition to the sound combine to positively bellow 1960s. Indeed the era is embraced in such an extreme fashion that perhaps some sneaky scientists have unlocked the secrets of time travel after all.
This could be the soundtrack to the summer of love with the guitar sequences reminiscent of Hendrix and chilled vocals of central performers Matt Valentine and Erika Elder. At times the duo are similar to fellow two piece Viva Voce, with a sound very firmly concentrating on sound rather than song content, yet MV & EE are much more psychedelic and have an absence of songs with the F word in the title.
'Drive is That I Love You' begins with a fuzzy wall of sound and the echoing vocals are coupled with feedback to create an edgy, distorted sound. The lyrics are largely indecipherable so the attention rests firmly on what is happening musically, which, given the length of the song being almost seven minutes, is not a great deal.
'Big Deal' opens with more guitar trickery and is clearly in no hurry for progression, with another rambling sequence of sounds and muffled vocals, which lasts for a staggering eight minutes. My only thoughts on the song at all are summed up easily by quoting the title, big deal indeed.
Closing track 'Solar Hill' continues in exactly the same fashion as this album began, with dull, repetitive and outright pretentious offerings which lack the most essential trait: they don't sound like songs. They meander forward with no progression and end after endless minutes of mind numbing preposterousness. Invest in this only if you think all music since 1970 is unspeakably awful, and even so you may find this rabble of peace and love hippies rather insulting in their naïve offering in our troubled times.