music Home > Record Reviews

Lo-cum-no-fi/shitgaze--pop/punk-lite music purposefully made to sound shitty, basically--should probably be taken behind the barn, shot, and buried without a gravestone. It's a novelty, if not an inside joke that won't shut up. Its shining moments--Eat Skull's Sick to Death, the Hunches' Exit Dreams--have passed and all that's left to do for it is homogenize into something massively dull. But Weekends, the Baltimore duo of Brendan Sullivan and Adam Lempel, appear to be having a fine, fun time in the lo-fi wake, becoming the sort of local house band that plays often and everywhere.

A 15 minute EP isn't the end-all place to hash it out, but Weekends has a few things going for it--and a couple against, such as the bare limitations of being a duo. Drums are messy and low in the mix, vocals are incomprehensibly sent through an echo and buried in the mix, leaving a whole bunch of guitar. And instead of going for muddy/sunny pop melodies with it, Sullivan goes for art-punk melodies with weird shifts: it's almost math-rock. That element sets it apart, and Weekends winds up a weird and sometimes potent dichotomy between mess and virtuosity--like watching something in process. Fine, but everything depends on where that process leads Weekends in the future.

E-mail Michael Byrne