The once hot breeding grounds for new and interesting forms of rock music are no more. Now all gentrified and surrounded by sky-high rents, such places that once were Petri dishes of culture clashes, weird and exciting approaches now often encourage the embracing of commodification or, with everything in the world available at the fingertips or just outside their door, they've become comfortable in a lassitude inducing bubble. A real world, with its sights, sounds, bumps, scrapes and bruises are all blunted and muted. The air starts to smell all the same all the time. It's stale air and it is all that is being breathed in and out.
Meanwhile, in places that are not on the tip of anyone's tongue, out of the ordinary sounds from the bored, the free-minded and the unequivocally esoteric collide. Occasionally the sorts pullulate, creating something with vaguely familiar angles and references contorted in a way that it gives the listening part of the brain something new to untangle.
The above is a perfect way to describe Charlotte, North Carolina's Patois Counselors. Though the city probably best known for it's Nascar track, drag strip and as headquarters for several large banking institutions, unless you happen to get lured into a conversation that revolves around K-Ci & JoJo or high fructose corn metal band Firehouse, it's unlikely a chat about the music of the city is going to continue into the wee hours of the night.
As wide as the gamut is between wrench crankers, high finance and 90's chart-toppers, the gamut is just as wide with this band.
Opening track "Disconnect Notice" and one of this writer's personal picks to click "Modern Station", find the austere drumbeats, whirling & spindly guitars and brusque lyrical delivery channeling things like the Fall and the Country Teasers.
Punk as art-funk appears in the guitar slashes and nervy rhythms of "Last Heat" and the other artsy-punk spazz outs reach the highest of levels "Repeat Offender."
Meanwhile, in places that are not on the tip of anyone's tongue, out of the ordinary sounds from the bored, the free-minded and the unequivocally esoteric collide. Occasionally the sorts pullulate, creating something with vaguely familiar angles and references contorted in a way that it gives the listening part of the brain something new to untangle.
The above is a perfect way to describe Charlotte, North Carolina's Patois Counselors. Though the city probably best known for it's Nascar track, drag strip and as headquarters for several large banking institutions, unless you happen to get lured into a conversation that revolves around K-Ci & JoJo or high fructose corn metal band Firehouse, it's unlikely a chat about the music of the city is going to continue into the wee hours of the night.
As wide as the gamut is between wrench crankers, high finance and 90's chart-toppers, the gamut is just as wide with this band.
Opening track "Disconnect Notice" and one of this writer's personal picks to click "Modern Station", find the austere drumbeats, whirling & spindly guitars and brusque lyrical delivery channeling things like the Fall and the Country Teasers.
Punk as art-funk appears in the guitar slashes and nervy rhythms of "Last Heat" and the other artsy-punk spazz outs reach the highest of levels "Repeat Offender."
"Target Is Not Comrade" closes the album and leaves the listener wrapping their brain around an orchestra of squalls and a melody of a new wave song they swore they've heard often but can't place a when or a where. The buzz of it all will find many wanting to come back again to cop the strange high again.
Get analyzed at Ever/Never Records
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