Zelienople His/Hers

[Type; 2007]

Rating: 4.5/5

Styles: anodyne rock
Others: Scott Tuma, Charalambides, Galaxie 500 on way more sedatives

I would prefer it if all music were played as slowly as possible. His/Hers is helping bring that dream to reality with its tempi that aspire to late Souled American torpidity. It’s heavy on the drone and the reverb. There are really no song structures to speak of, but boy are those lengths perfect. Everything floats in at around nine minutes, which means the guitar got strummed, like, 11 or 12 times, tops. When things form up a bit more solidly (still, solid here is decidedly liquid), the group recalls the sound and feel of former Souled American Scott Tuma’s fantastic country-ambient solo outings Hard Again and The River 1 2 3 4 fronted by Dean Wareham. (This is only fitting, seeing as how the Zelienople bros joined up with Mr. Tuma to form the distinctly and precisely named Good Stuff House a couple years back.)

“Family Beast” and “Sweet Ali” act as excellent, shorter bookends to the monstrous three central tracks. “Moss Man” gets things going with a sort of Spacemen 3 jam that devolves eventually into clattering percussion and an exquisitely mortared wall of guitar feedback, while “Parts Are Lost” is the closest Zelienople get to pop. A shuffling guitar part is accompanied by bells and vocalist Matt Christensen repeating “the parts are lost” and some other unintelligible lines, before it turns into a long, flowing riff you think you can predict (but can’t), which in turn morphs into temple-drone. “Forced March” is His/Hers at its harshest, with a steady tribal beat and fuzz-riddled guitars that eventually mellow to bring the temple-drone right on back.

A drugged-out classic in my book.

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