It's good to be able to find bands that are still hooked on the uneasy tensions underpinning off-kilter guitar rock that great, now sadly defunct Canadian band Women doled out in veritable spades. Faux Fur's self-titled debut isn't exactly new - it was floating about the Internet last year, you might have even heard 'Rough Palms' here or there - but those rad dudes at Faux Discx finally done right by these boys and put it out on a cassette. The connection to Women is both literal (the drummer is a Flegel) and aesthetic - the intricate, spindly guitarwork that feels ephemeral, crafted out of dust motes floating in sunlight sneaking through the slits of a Venetian blind, everything in shades of grey, brown, black; cymbal tapping drums that percolate, ferment, and bubble forth; vocals that echo out from a lost radio station on a lost highway, neither dusk nor dawn, stuck in a time that time forgot; all coalescing in a piano-wire tension of increments that succumbs to fitful bursts of energy and abandon before being subdued once more...
It's this level of post-punk - a meandering exercise in concise mantras and clipped mannerisms, a sepia sepulchre ensconced in the wall of a forgotten tomb, forlorn yet restless - that I always find most entrancing. And seeing as those haunted netherworld vocals come from an eighteen year old - their power is only growing.
Grab Faux Fur here. It's a fantastic release, and nigh on impossible to choose a favourite track - although I'm mostly digging 'Laundromat' and 'Saw You Standing' right now.
