Disappears – Guider (Kranky Records)

(Slightly cleaned up version of a review originally published on www.losingtoday.com)

Guider, the second full length from Chicago’s Disappears, continues down the same path as their monolithic 2010 debut, Lux; even sharing the same  thirty-minute run-time. Their songs, usually just a few simple effects-laden guitar chords and a shout/sung vocal buried in murky production – are not what you would call technically exciting. However, even if nobody in the band is likely to be auditioning for Led Zeppelin anytime soon, you have to  credit them for sticking steadfastly to an approach that combines the  minimalism/amatuerism of proto-punk with krautrock’s love of repetition. This  comparison really comes to fruition on “New Fast”, which sounds just as much  like Neu covering a song from the first Stooges album as it does The Stooges covering a song from the first Neu album. The album ends with “Revisiting”, a fifteen minute number that lies somewhere between monotonous space-filler and the trance-inducing genius of Spacemen 3. Guider isn’t a record that’s likely to  become one of the cornerstones of your collection, but it’s definitely worth  checking out if records by the bands mentioned above are.

Disappears – Lux (Kranky Records)

(Slightly cleaned up version of a review originally published on www.losingtoday.com)

Disappears, a Chicago group featuring members of The Ponys and The Boas, are lucky that their debut album is even getting released at all. The band were the last act to be signed to Touch and Go Records before the label’s collapse, which left them in limbo until Kranky Records came along. and picked them up. Their album, Lux, is a monolithic beast of Stooges-influenced proto-punk, submerged underneath a billowy cloud of reverb. It’s not all that dissimilar from the first albums by The Go or The Black Angels. At twenty-nine minutes, there isn’t a lot of time for mucking about on Lux, and the band sticks heartily to the basics: a repetitive beat, a riff and a simple, barked vocal. There’s not much variety from song to song, and given the band’s  udimentary musicianship, the album’s monochromatic sound becomes a liability at around the halfway point; and that liability grows with each additional similar song from there on in. Lux is still likable for those with a  penchant for psychedelic proto-punk, but an album this short really shouldn’t be appreciated like it is – in small doses.

Tracklisting:

1. Gone Completely

2. Magics

3. Pearly Gates

4. Marigold

5. Not Nothing

6. Lux

7. Old Friend

8. Little Ghost

9. New Cross

10. No Other