Travis from The Chewers has sent me this to review and
as with their 1st album, people have to decide if it is wilfully
weird or just the way their minds work.
One of the pleasures in doing this blog is receiving music out
of the blue that you have never heard before. For a band that
play sparse arrangements with minimal soundscapes, they
conjure up a sense of slight unease - nothing drastic - just the
feeling that someone is walking behind you but when you turn
around, no-one is there or when you use public transport and
realise that the guy in the smart suit with a sensible haircut
actually has vomit stains down his shirt and he is muttering
bible phrases under his breath.
The Chewers use hardly any distortion on the guitars, giving
a clean tone that makes every off-kilter and I suspect, illegal
chords, crawl along the song passages. The vocals are effect
ridden, sounding like a deranged preacher in full ranting
god-praise over a badly tuned car radio.
Still sounding like country and western Devo, the early
Beefheart punk blues tracks have a slightly more cohesive
feel to them as opposed to the almost random snippets of
previous works.
Give it a go!
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