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Dumb
Seeing Green
Mint - 2018
Michael Panontin
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Dumb is the new smart...
...is how the one-sheet cheekily refers to this relatively new BC band. The Vancouver-based four-piece of Franco Rossino and Nick Short (guitars), Shelby Vredik (bass) and Pipe Morelli (drums) are definitely a busy bunch, having quickly rifled off three EP-length recordings before this, their first true full-length.
Seeing Green, the band's debut for the Mint label, is a collection of terse and quirky tunes that seem to work their way around the colour green and its various modern-day metaphors. "The album revolves around a confused and angry young person unknowingly being tossed around by the same western capitalist conditioning that we've all been raised on," Rossino dutifully informs us. "Green in this sense refers to being a novice, as well as to money, envy, and growth. It's meant to be somewhat of a self-aware exaggeration of some feelings in our everyday lives that we often don't want to admit to and may even lie to ourselves about."
That sort of post-millennial angst courses its way through much of the record, which kicks off with the deliriously edgy 'Romeo', an alternating hacking and whirling guitar attack that can only be described as one minute and twenty-five seconds of pure post-punk bliss. This segues - swiftly and thus ever so deftly - into perhaps the album's best cut, the equally riveting 'Barnyard', which weirdly crosses early Pylon, specifically Randy Bewley's springy guitar work, with Colin Newman's unhinged screaming a la Wire's Pink Flag. Though things get raunchier (the distortion-heavy 'Hard Sea') and subtler (the more finessed 'Don't Get Me Started' and 'Ripesnakes'), they never get dull.
Seeing Green is a guitar lover's delight. Fans of the aforementioned bands, or even those rare souls who can still remember the Mekons' gloriously amateurish recordings for Bob Last's Fast Product imprint, will probably lap this stuff up.
(FOMO alert: there are only 100 vinyl copies on limited green vinyl - what else? - so you'd better get cracking.)
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