It is hard to imagine only four people in this band. I mean, sometimes it seems like one musician with eight arms and then sometimes it sounds like a gang of eight musicians with eight arms each and a few extra mouths to sing and play some trombone, to boot.
The name of the game for this New York band is rhythm. Michael McCurdy's drums stutter and collapse and build through every track, aided by the strange and wonderful percussion of Russell Greenberg. Who would think adding chimes to the crescendo parts would add that much more intensity? Luckily, these guys did. Their quest for rhythm and their use of the vibraphones might get the Hi Red Center a lot of comparisons to Tortoise, but there is much more youthful exuberance in this band's music, rather than resigned jazz chops. This music falls closer to the work of A Minor Forest, Menomena, and even the Make-Believe. It is math-rock mixed gloriously well with the voices of the mathematicians themselves. These are songs of the human machine, coming unglued and being pulled back together.
I tend to like their slower, more atmospheric pieces a little more. "Hollow Buttons", with its stacatto keyboard pulse running through its swirling and building intensity, is a beautifully restrained song. And the closer "Bunnies are Full of Magic", aside from fulfilling the indie-rock demand for funny and ironic song titles, is probably closer to the work of Town and Country than Tortoise, but hey, it's all still Chicago. While Ben Lanz is also the very skilled guitarist of Hi Red Center, he blows some mean trombone on this track (and throughout the record).
Impossible to classify and mixing their influences effortlessly and effectively into a new music for the future, Hi Red Center will hopefully continue erecting these architectural failures in the future, making each one more dizzying and grand.
- Grant Capes | 2006-10-05
