Rodan - Rusty LP (champagne- color vinyl)

Rodan - Rusty LP (Quarterstick Records/USA)

An all timer and one of those records that I make sure any fan of Slint, Unwound, and Engine Kid also own.

As an influential indie-rock landmark, Slint’s second album, Spiderland, helped chart new directions for abstract guitar skronk. While the quartet’s tenure was short, Slint left its mark most palpably at ground zero: the exciting and close-knit Louisville underground scene.

Though it would be unfair to call Rodan — another short-lived enterprise, by guitarists Jason B. Noble and Jeffery Mueller, bassist Tara Jane O’Neil and drummer Kevin Coultas — Slint Jr., comparisons are inevitable. Both bands used haunting speak-sing vocals, relied on propulsive, start-stop/quiet-loud rhythm dynamics and created noisy, sweeping music. In many ways, Rusty sounds like what Slint might’ve evolved into. The record’s wiry energy might also fit the loosely defined “math rock” category, coined to describe bands that play complicated music more akin to theorems than just sound (kind of like Ozma-era Melvins married to a more atmospheric art-core interpretation of Big Black). Sometimes breathtaking, sometimes indulgent, Rusty‘s expansive songs include the mysterious, twelve-minute opus “The Everyday World of Bodies,” the ghostly “Bible Silver Corner,” the ferocious “Shiner” and the singular, ethereal “Tooth Fairy Retribution Manifesto.”

-Trouser Press