What the internet needed was another dude in Brooklyn writing about music so I started a site a while ago but work got nuts in November so I had to drop it for a bit. I'm picking it back up and this is the first music review since that hiatus.
I have been listening to this an almost obscene amount and even now I can hear Medusa Reducer in my head.
Roanoke is where you expect people to vanish to, not come from. Yet, thanks to Allison Apperson of Richmond’s perfect pop band Hot Lava, I’m aware of The Magic Twig Community, an artist and musician collective based in Roanoke on par with the better known Elephant 6 or Wham City communities. Back when I first got into Hot Lava, I asked Allison for more suggestions of bands to check out, as I always do, and she suggested The Sad Cobras as her first pick. So I went and essentially bought everything they had in print at the time and grabbed a lot of other Magic Twig Community releases as well.
The Sad Cobras, SUNKING!, and The Young Sinclairs all made their way to my mailbox and I gave them a listen, but of the three the one that really struck me was the SUNKING! album Dreamy of the Sunchildren. There was something in the songs that really grabbed me, simple and dreamy pop songs yet of a solid construction that held up to scrutiny.
I don’t know if this overshadowed the other releases but I don’t recall liking The Sad Cobras as much as I do here on this 7” split with Hot Lava.
The Sad Cobras was doing keyboard heavy examinations of pop music with an odd staccato vocal style from singer Deedraye would shift from rhythm based to melody based from song to song or even phrase to phrase. It was good songwriting, but again, it just didn’t capture me at that time. It was lacking a solid foundation for me to orient myself to what they were doing as a band. This release does not have that problem.
The split starts out with “U.S.A. Forever” one minute of straightforward rock couched in surf emulation with jangly guitars with sounds that stretch out forever and sleigh bells on down beats like a clarion call to youth and it serves as a great introduction to the other two songs on this side of the split.
“Medusa Reducer” immediately feels familiar yet unique in its approach to pop music with a call for a Medusa Reducer to help out with a Gorgon problem. I’ve found myself singing the simple refrains to myself through out the past two days “oh how I need myself a Medusa reducer.” The music is solid but the lyrics are so surreal and seemingly out of place, and it feels more like a preview than a full track, but I cannot deny the catchiness of they way the mechanics of the whole things just fits together and the track just goes in circles like a perfectly built clock.
After hearing these two songs, “Team Mother” is almost a shock. If it weren’t for the singer, you could mistake it for being from another band entirely. Gone are the drums and bass and guitar and instead is a voice a keyboard and a drum loop. “Team Mother” is a song about Lacrosse Moms, the mothers too ambitious for their youths. The first verse is “Stick it in Ryan, Stick it in Ryan” and the seemingly needling and pleading “if you get a goal I promise I’ll buy you a Frostee from Wendy’s / Honor Roll isn’t the only thing I care about” ending with “good game, good game good game.” It’s very funny and very suburban and very upper middle class and it shows that there’s more to the band that just surrealism and surf sounds, of which I’m thankful. There are too many surf bands.
Really the best thing I can say about this is that it’s made me re-examine my initial thoughts on the band and I need to re-rip the CD so I can go back and try to see if I missed this all the first time or if they’ve just managed to hone their craft in the interim.
Hot Lava’s side starts off with “The Auctioneer”, which is probably the purest expression of that band’s pop music craft yet recorded. It starts with a sharp intake of breath as Allison prepares to sing so fast that I have trouble capturing exactly what she’s saying or what the song is about moving at the speed of a famed auctioneer. It’s probably the best expression of “Hot Lava” as it exists as a band rather than its start of Allison’s messing around with Garage Band. Each instrument, even the subtle multi-tracked clarinet works to push the song breathlessly forward, ever forward.
“Task Master” brings together those humble beginnings with more of an emphasis on the electronic elements without allowing them to overshadow any other elements of the song. Good solid writing that shows an evolution as a band since I first managed to catch them a year ago.
While these two songs are good, I think that “Lady Postman” is the best of the three on this side with some great lines delivered while someone waits for important mail “You know my name but don’t care who I am.”
I feel like such a fraud and like I’m doing such a disservice to Hot Lava, because you can only write “Pure Pop Perfection” and worse yet READ it so many times before your brain just shuts off and you say “sure, ok, got it” and you pass it over, but there is some intangible element that defies description with regards to Hot Lava. You say it’s “great” but with the ever-increasing hyperbolic nature of Internet music writing “great” merely becomes “good” becomes “ok” becomes “meh” becomes “horrible” and your lowered expectations are neck in neck with the declining quality of music writing in a race for which there are no winners.
Hot Lava is wonderful and has been for a while. They are not chasing trends in an attempt to gain recognition but are steadily, quietly, and almost seemingly imperceptibly to the world at large turning into one of the greatest hidden secrets of the East Coast.
You can buy the 7” for $7 below, and it comes with digital download.
http://thesadcobrasandhotlava.bandcamp.com/album/the-sad-cobras-hot-lava-split-7got permission to post two of the tracks to the site, so if you are curious:
http://www.kingofthegigabitches.com/blog/2010/01/14/the-sad-cobras-hot-lava-7-split/
