Le Pilgrim Démo cassette
Genuinely weird shit coming out of Buffalo, NY! I couldn’t turn up anything about the band, so it’s unclear who all is involved with the project—their Bandcamp profile pic is just an image of what appears to be a teen plucked straight out of one of the audiences in The Decline of Western Civilization. In any case, this appears to be their debut release. It’s eight tracks (a quarter of which are sung in French) of what I would primarily describe as USHC, maybe on the skate rock end of the spectrum. But the production is pretty bizarre—the guitars are both thin and really fuzzy, while the vocals, which are pretty buried in the mix, sound like they were recorded in an abandoned mineshaft. Then, every so often a really faint keyboard kicks in, or a “Careless Whisper”-ass saxophone lick, or even a TALKING HEADS-esque vocal melody. Really bizarre stuff, all of which is wrapped in a J-card seemingly signaling you’re about to listen to some playful European post-punk. I don’t know that I loved this, but I’m certainly fascinated by everything about it.