Big Waves of Pretty might technically hail from Wisconsin, but their home is (the couch in your garage) {your absent roommate’s bed} [the corner booth of a highway diner] somewhere across America, location after location, gobbled up in single-serving portions before getting back on the road again. The group’s tour with Bridgetown Records founder Kevin Greenspon stretched past 100 dates in the course of more than four months, allowing them to woodshed new material before fresh faces in basements, bars, and galleries each night. I managed to catch them twice on this tour, and remember: six-string shred, hyper-precise drum battery, cacophonous gang vocalization, dozens of bells handed into the crowd, hair flopping, shirts coming off, gear set up on the floor, amps facing inward, eye contact, irreverence, spirit. The two shows blur together in my mind. I imagine +100 shows blur deeper for them.
But here we have a succinct 27-minute document of their energy in the form of It Is A Sight He Never Forgets, recorded in Minneapolis at the end of their journey. BWOP’s aural transience matches their physical wanderlust, as their convictions bleed from the speakers in an ecstatic blitz of fingers and throats pushed to the edge of reason for the sake of comrades, strangers, and each other. “Big Waves” offers just that, as washes of effected six-string texture fuse with bell percussion before the math-rock takedown hits with crisp arpeggios and tight snare rolls. “Feeling Stoned” and “Blissed” temper the Dead-meets-DonCab vibes of Akron/Family and contemporaries with bruising blastbeats, warp-speed riffing and turn-on-a-dime song structures. “Goldenrod” stretches into narcotic ballad zones with vocal harmonies and harmonica peals before “If You Not Going To Sparkle What The Fuck Did You Come For” caps off the tape as a manifesto of their varied strategies.
It Is A Sight He Never Forgets is available now from the newly revived (never dead) Bridgetown Records, or spring for the package deal of the whole Spring batch.
• Big Waves of Pretty: http://bigwavesofpretty.org
• Bridgetown Records: http://www.bridgetownrecords.info
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