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Hair Police: Obedience Cuts


Hair Police: Obedience Cuts

Label:Freedom From
Format:Album
Media:CD
Genre:Rock/Pop

By Raymond Cummings | Posted 6/30/2004

Noise-rock records are capable of wisking the imagination to any number of unlikely milieus at their most jaw-dropping, wig-flippingly twisted. Sightings’ Absolutes zoomed in on and magnified the rending contortions of sheet metal during a car crash; Gate’s Golden imagined airport-sized über-drones tones; Sonic Youth’s Silver Sessions for Jason Knuth doused feedback in Tide and bleach, then threw it into a Kenmore for a half-hour-long spin cycle.

On Obedience Cuts, Lexington, Ky.’s Hair Police presents some good ideas for day trips but fails to make them work as a full-scale, continuous journey. You could hang out in a dank basement while some dude takes bong hits as the Dead C’s White House plays (“The Empty Socket”); marvel as drummer Trevor Tremaine, guitarist Mike Connelly, and electronics sadist Robert Beatty heap messy, rec-room improv doom atop Connelly’s tortured, 10th-circle-of-hell howls (“Let’s See Who’s Here and Who’s Not”); bliss out to guest player C. Spencer Yeh’s severely distorted cello scrapes echoing ever closer from the other end of a football field-sized room (“Boneless”); or enjoy a cicada siren song of digital feedback (“Forged by Wreck”). Unfortunately, many of these tracks conclude before you’re fully lost in them. It might help to think of Obedience Cuts as a collection of singles that were never issued. Taken as a whole, Cuts feels like nine postcards from nine different, if reasonably alluring, vacations. Close your eyes and wish you were there.

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