In Stores Now: Wild and Inside by Eat Skull

Watercolor titled "Hospital--Great Shadows on the Wall" by Claggett Wilson, c. 1940

Wild and Inside came out back in April, but I'm still playing catch-up on some of these harder-to-track-down releases. I'm glad I finally picked this up, though, because it's easily my favorite of the nu-lo-fi (aka the genre lovingly referred to as "shitgaze") releases that came out this year. I don't know much about Eat Skull except that they're from Portland and that they're on Siltbreeze Records, but those two facts are actually major pointers to the key elements of Eat Skull's sound. The fuzzy-buzzy sound is very Siltbreeze, but there's a warmth to the mix that makes the music less immediately off-putting than a band like Times New Viking. And the songs alternate between a bouncy energy (obviously derived from NZ pop bands like the Clean) and a more relaxed West Coast vibe.

Wild and Inside has a deceptively large number of straightforward pop numbers, but less direct songs are also in the mix to provide a much-needed variety - "Who's in Control?" is a fun singalong, "Surfing the Stairs" is atmospheric and creepy, and "Talkin' Bro in the Wall Blues" slows things way down without getting boring. The album's major problem is that the two least successful experiments are found back-to-back in the album's first half - "You're With a Thing" is a barely-there less successful version of "Talkin' Bro", and it is followed by the thrash-by-numbers of "Nuke Mecca".

But the good Clean fun of songs like "Stick to the Formula", "Dawn in the Face", and the Magnetic-Fields-like closer "Oregon Dreaming" are the real story here, and they show that Eat Skull can serve up great hooks that ride the fuzzy sound straight into your brain. My favorite song on the album, "Heaven's Stranger", tells the whole story in its first 30 seconds - that's enough time for the song to deliver a nice guitar-and-organ intro and three or four melodic turns. It's the perfect thing for people who like this kind of thing, and I highly recommend it for people who respond positively to recommendations of this kind.

"Heaven's Stranger" by Eat Skull