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Album reviews Music

Guerilla Toss

Guerilla Toss – Eraser Stargazer

Guerilla Toss seem capable of doing anything except repeating themselves. They’ve carved a haphazard trail through dozens of genres since forming in Boston in 2010, picking up comparisons to bands as diverse as Melt-Banana and Red Hot Chili Peppers. In terms of their musicianship and approach to composition, however, they’re closer to Deerhoof: music-school weirdos playing unruly, idiosyncratic songs propelled more by explosive dynamism than by hooks, melody or chord progressions.

Eraser Stargazer, their longest and highest-profile release to date, is dense with texture. Founding member Peter Negroponte’s manic, polyrhythmic drumming and Kassie Carlson’s vocal paroxysms provide the push and pull, with layers of guitar shrapnel, bass crud and synth ooze crammed in so that the songs tremble with energy. The aural equivalent of a Seripop print or Paper Rad animation, it’s mixed as though somebody spilled bong water all over the console. Their sound conjures the ambience of the dank loft and basement performance venues the band’s music has rung out in for the past half decade.

The record’s a snapshot in time of a band that has thus far been defined by relentless forward motion and unpredictability. As such, it doesn’t adequately capture all they have to offer. Will the international internet-based audience they’re trying to attract, who’ve hardly noticed their prolific shape-changing and border-transgressing, receive this as enthusiastically as those who have been knocked flat by the live show or taken a trip through their varied back catalogue? Songs like Multibeast TV and Big Brick come across as fragments of an album narrative that doesn’t quite materialize, and ragers like Grass Shack and Perfume hearken back to the played-out New York dance-rock craze of the early aughts.

Eraser Stargazer is full of ideas, a lot of them half-baked. But for the band, it’s a courageous, wholehearted lunge into a more danceable form of convulsive mayhem, and into more elliptical and impressionistic narratives.

Top track: Color Picture

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