Jesus - Guerilla Toss know how to fry minds. On their new album Eraser Shoegazer, the Boston noise nihilists aren't as brazenly abrasive as previous releases - instead embracing the groove, jazz inflections, disco rhythms and r'n'b textures just to set them in a paint-mixer and leaving the door open, the contents a manic kaleidoscope of frenetic abandon. It's all in that bass - thick, sinuous, suggestive - what are we getting here? Then we have Kassie Carlson - an unhinged vocalist somewhere caught between Screaming Females' Marissa Paternoster, Deerhoof's Satomi Matsuzaki and Lydia Lunch. You have the funk desiccation in a Soviet-era arcade game that is 'Grass Shack'; the contorted cowbell mania of 'Diamond Girls', like Tortoise trying their hand at calypso on ketamine; the minimal maximalism in tribal percussive repetition, scratched and ratcheted guitar, chants and yelps (underlaid by an insidious synth hook) on the excellent 'Perfume'... Guerilla Toss are a band both artful and anti-art; performance, mantra, idiocy, id. I have always loved the insanity that the band has brought to their music - but with Eraser Stargazer, they have made it addictive, a dance bomb. Bring it on. Pre-order the album in clear green through DFA Records here.
