.jpg "KRAUTROCK'S AIRSPACE: GoGoGo Airheart are as fractured as their songs' trajectories.")
For a decade, this shifting San Diego quartet have flown sorties across the DIY circuit, zigzagging through krautrock airspace between no wave and new wave. On their sixth album, the attention spans of these art-damaged punks remain as fractured as their songs’ trajectories. Some two-minute tracks (“So Good,” “Taxi Up,” “Come to My House”) come across as effusive Spirographs — crudely splattered concentric torrents of trebly guitars and Mike Vermillion’s pursed rabble rousing. These coherent if nervy blasts are peppered throughout the disc by arbitrarily abbreviated, bristly and gristly pockets of dub and dingy garage rawk salvos that mysteriously end with no resolution. But amid the cluttered akimbo ellipses lie shambolic pop gems. The jangly white-light/white-heat strutters “Heart on a Chain” and “Shattered” lock into linear Velvetsy grooves. The artlessly produced, compressed-sounding “Lie with the Lamb” and the tightly coiled “Shake It Off” are GoGoGo Airheart at their most accessible. If the band were willing to jettison some of the more inscrutable material, or at least integrate it into the disc’s flow, then Rats! Sing! Sing! would ease them toward a more listener-friendly, less Dischord-ant direction. But that may not be the point.
GoGoGo Airheart + Jai Alai Savant + Subtitle | March 5 | Middle East upstairs, 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 617.864.EAST
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On the Web:
GoGoGo Airheart: http://www.gogogoairheart.com/
