Jinxed By The Weekend

I am a very big fan of San Francisco band Weekend, and their more scuzzy take on the shoegaze wall of sound. Their Sports debut was a enema to the ears - initially uncomfortable, wholly enjoyable, and (supposedly) good for you. Their follow up EP Red showed a straddling between the rusted bucket first offering and more hi-fi fare, and now the sophomore LP Jinx has hit - and it feels like the best title for an album for some time. 

The way songs like ‘Celebration, FL’ adheres to the more dream pop aesthetic of the shoegaze wash, a gossamer lilt rather than a abrasive full tilt, is the most marked development of the Weekend routine – and it isn’t always a welcomed intrusion. Go back to Sports – sure, there is a sense of repetition there that dulled the blows, but the wall of noise that songs like 'Youth Haunts' produced can be physically felt, a sonic boom of industrial grit that would have contemporaries A Place To Bury Strangers reaching for more pedals in anticipation of the counterattack. It doesn’t irk as much as it could - 'July' and 'It's Alright' has the requisite aggression all round to shake the foundations, whilst ‘Sirens’ has the soft touch that alludes to the new sound the trio are undoubtedly striving to reach. So Jinx isn’t the game-changer I was secretly hoping it would be. And yet I'm inexorably drawn back to it. It’s an incredibly catchy, space-filled variation of the MBV blueprint, one that potentially offers more replay value than its predecessor – so you damned if you do, damned if you don’t (at least in my shoes). Am I being fucked with? I don't know. But the unease is shifting - I'm giving in.

Slumberland are putting Jinx out, and the current batch o wax looks decidedly awesome - grab it here.