Eraser Stargazer

Albumbeschreibung

Over the years, Guerilla Toss gave their outbursts a kinetic backbone that made comparisons to highly experimental acts like Ponytail and Black Dice as well as pioneering punk-funkers like Public Image Ltd. equally apt. The band's first full-length for DFA, Eraser Stargazer, builds on the growing sophistication they displayed on the Flood Dosed EP, which suggested that Guerilla Toss learned that hinting at all-out chaos is more effective than diving headlong into it. As on that EP, these songs focus on the band's most distinctive elements: Kassie Carlson's freewheeling vocals and the wild polyrhythms spearheaded by drummer Pete Negroponte. Together, they sound tropical and alien, and balanced in a way that doesn't seem overly tamed. "Diamond Girls" is at once disjointed and grooving, maintaining cohesion no matter how unhinged things get; on lengthier, more ambitious songs like "Grass Shack" and "Doll Face on the Calico Highway," Carlson acts as a tour guide, her spoken-word narratives snaking through her bandmates' cacophony. She sounds equally haughty and fanciful as she and the rest of Guerilla Toss play with notions of permanence and impermanence as well as nonsense and profundity, whether she's exclaiming "Me instead of me instead of you" with irreverent insistence on "Eraser Stargazer Forever" or musing "After an idea is absent/You could find it lazily/Like an aura that has stayed there too long" on "Perfume." While enlightenment through disorientation might not be everyone's moment of Zen, Eraser Stargazer suggests that Guerilla Toss is an acquired taste more listeners could develop.
© Heather Phares /TiVo