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Tyvek’s LP is a good one: for a start the cover is marvellous; a band made out of plasticine, all looking pretty gormless, serenade us. This feeling of feckless, devil may care abandon is continued in the music, which is a heady mix of visceral and throwaway. Imagine a messy Clinic, or Apples in Stereo completely pissed out of their minds. It’s very much in your face: Circular Ruins harnesses a rugged and very repetitive guitar riff to a lot of flute-like noises and the vocals and drums stomp over everyone else at will. It’s amateur-sounding for sure, but there’s purpose behind it. You suspect some higher intelligence at work. Summer Things sounds like a mash of No Bulbs and a Swell Maps track. It is engaging thrashy garage pop and one of the best tracks on the LP.
Other garage gems are the marvellous – and very 60’s – punk strut, Het Una, which starts as an infectious song only to break down into a maudlin soliloquy two minutes in. Following that, Frustration Rock kicks up racket, issuing shards of white tinny noise at random over a thumping and primal beat. Stand and Fight comes close to being an anthem, with a rousing strum for an ending whereas Building Burning is a great two part slob out; the first section drags its feet quite a lot whereas its partner in crime is energy itself, bouncing along on a sea of thrashy noise, sounding like Pay Your Rates before it reverts to a slow shuffle.
You’ll also notice when listening that this LP has a lot of tracks that sound like interludes: listing them gives you Sonora, Tecate, El Centro and Mexicali. Repeated playing reveals these interludes be the same track broken up; which is quite nice, and a clever enough trick, though at first a little disorientating.
Now recently there’s been a spate of bands making one minute thrash-alongs, which is fine as it goes, as long as there’s something alongside the noise to hook you in. No-one has ever really perfected it as well as Guided by Voices, (probably no-one will) but Tyvek come close to making an LP with short snappy interesting songs that also indulge in complete 60’s styled mong outs, especially What To Do, which sounds like Michael Mooney is fronting the band .
Enjoyable stuff.