Geo Geo cassette
GEO has a cowbell and they’re going to use it! The opening track of this Dutch quintet’s initial four-song cassette offering is called “Elasticate,” and that’s pretty much the modus operandi here—taut, rubbery mutant funk by way of some moderated Downtown 81/21 no wave tendencies, with conversationally depersonalized vocals, snaking bass-centered grooves, cling-clang percussion, frenetic six-string scratch sliding into restrained single-note punctuations, and brief squirming synth accents. In what seems to have become the dominant method of post-punk expression in our times, it’s all very clean and clinical (a means of forcing order upon highly unstable lived realities and certainly doomed futures?), with any pent-up kinetic urgency generally kept from spiralling out of bounds. “Hydrate” releases that tight grip ever-so slightly with its strangled shouts and squalls of jumbled guitar racket, but I’d personally love to see GEO really let loose and bump up the precarious FIRE ENGINES quotient by a couple of factors.