The Meets: It Happens Outside LP (My Idea Of Fun, 2013)
October 16, 2013 at 10:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Meets: It Happens Outside LP
This is the type of release I just file as “post-rock” for convenience’s sake just so my brain will shut up and I don’t have to argue with myself about what to call it and how meaningless and inaccurate that term is. But since I’m actually reviewing this album, I’ll explain a bit more. At least as much as I can just listening to a CDr promo with no liner notes. This album is a pretty free-flowing collage of drum grooves, turntable scratching, harmonica, horn squawks, oblong strings, and meandering bass guitar. Apart from the 7-minute space-out “As a Period in Which Nothing Happens”, most of the tracks are fairly short, about 1 to 3 minutes, and they all run together, making it hard to really pick out highlights, as this seems intended to be digested as one singular piece. The opening track starts with a shruti, some fizzing static, a few isolated guitar plucks and drum hits, and a trombone, so that’s intriguing enough. From then, it’s a pretty choppy, processed, free-flowing mish-mash of beats (live and programmed), scratching, woodwinds, and delicate guitar and bass. Very spontaneous and jumps from idea to idea, as if the group came up with a lot of them and wanted to just use all of them, no time to sort them all out and make sense of them. It’s really around the middle of the record that the ideas seem to come together more coherently, and begin to sound like something greater than just random jamming. “Even When The Time Comes” could even be the soundtrack to a scene in a weird futuristic spy movie, with its horns, vibraphone and easily paced beat, with scratching and electronic bursts on top.
The Answer Is In The Beat 
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