You.May.Die.In.The.Desert: Feedbackery

Here in the land of the free we’ve been slacking a bit lately when it comes to instrumental music; while the rest of the world is progressing and doing all kinds of insanity, we’ve started to become *gasp* generic. While this doesn’t apply to all American bands, many have. And even some of our heavy hitters are putting out sub-par music; Explosions in the Sky is stuck in the bland repetition rut, and Pelican’s latest is just sad. But thank Godspeed for the new breed! One of the most promising American bands is You.May.Die.In.The.Desert; these Seattleites take the tried and true post-rock formula of clean guitars, bass, drums and long ambient tracks and gives it a new look and attitude. That’s not to say that this is glam rock or anything, rest assured, YMDITD isn’t doing anything too far from the tree of instrumental music, but it’s certainly sprouting in an interesting way. From the opening guitar line of “Oceanfloor Hijinks” two things are clear, first: the delay pedal will play a prominent role in these songs, and second: these guys have a definite free-jazz influence. Regarding the delay pedal, all the songs feature it in abundance and it works great. Dueling guitar lines twist in and out of each other as the previous notes come and entangle themselves with the following ones. The result is enchanting; in quiet moments such as “Interlude” and “The Writer’s Audience Is Fiction” the notes chime and shimmer, dancing in a never-ending sequence of ambience. In the harder parts, it works even better. On “Can I Get More Steel In My Monitors?” YMDITD pull off a sound that is tantalizing, solo style guitars loop and playback in a twisted mess of six-strings. The way the songs are written and the delay is used, each line not only has to work by itself, but also with the following line, it’s a complex style and one that is a true testament to just how much talent these boys have. All the songs except “Interlude” contain some serious jazz influenced jamming, the best of these being “Monorails” and the title track. “Monorails” has some almost metal parts with big riffs, detailed lead lines, pounding drums, and thudding bass. The title track isn’t as hard, but is just a wild and technical, clean guitars slip and slide in and out of each other and this eventually gives way to some serious distorted riffing with an ever looming but never quite appearing, burst of feedback. YMDITD have taken styles done by several other different bands and blended them together, run them through a delay pedal and jazzed them up a little bit. The whole EP is exciting and never drags or bores. For those who only use instrumental music as background noise for study or reading, you maybe surprised just how much this album grabs your attention. YMDITD is giving America some much needed cred and is doing something the scene has needed for a while, making guitar based instrumental music interesting again.
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