Stutter Steps are the current band of Dean Wareham collaborator Ben Harrison who is also a curator at the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh. His 'Floored' EP is out on Cleveland's Blue Arrow records. I was extremely happy to see the show of rare Warhol Movies with live soundtracks he helped Curate that I saw at the Barbican and reviewed here Barbican review online
Yes it does sound like the music you'd expect from someone who has worked with Dean Wareham, but it isn't quite as one dimensional as Dean can be. The opener, Floored, is a good shoegaze jangle pop song that sounds familiar in a good way but also a little bit on the bland side.
Dim, however, has a cool little riff and the extra echo on the vocals makes it sound more like it should have been on Postcard Records as it owes a good bit to Josef K and Orange Juice with vocals that also remind me a bit of The Vaselines.
Submarine has some cool keyboards underpinning it and is nice and gauzy laid back jangle, but also a bit on the slight side. Identical Eyes opens like it's a long lost but not missed Luna song even if it's Cindy Yogman's backing vocals that sound more like Dean Wareham's than Ben Harrison's do. It's still a nice laid back song that has just about enough to make you listen to the lyrics to find out what it's about.
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So is Weak Restraint about some S & M scene or a drug habit that just won't leave you alone? Well it's jangle pop so not S & M, I imagine, but even if the lyrics aren't, the vocals are suggestive of people searching for the next hit as the organ comes in to make the pain of withdrawal go away. Maybe that's my imagination, but either way this is probably the most catchy thing on this EP. Oh and I certainly don't have the answers they are looking for either.
Encino is about going back to California and making sure you sound like Luna while you're doing it and also that you look at all the flowers while you're at it. It's a nice, laid-back ending to a decent but hardly ground-breaking EP that isn't long enough at 23 minutes to bore me enough to start a riot.
Find out more at Blue Arrow Records online
Stutter Steps online
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