E Living Waters LP
Couple of real stalwarts of clang within E’s three-person lineup: Thalia Zedek has held it down in Boston and its outskirts for over 40 years, with UZI, LIVE SKULL and COME all revered among those who know (and like their wrist-slitting noise blues). Jason Sanford founded NEPTUNE, a band who played discordant post-hardcore on self-built, spine-bendingly heavy scrap metal instruments in the mid-’90s, and drummer Ernie Kim used to play with a band called HARRY AND THE POTTERS (but pretend I didn’t bring that up). Anyway, this is the fifth “proper” E album by my reckoning, and it’s a big, burly fucker, equally enervating and energising. Recorded semi-remotely, with Zedek and Kim in Boston and Sanford in Boulder, every riff and drum hit is captured perfectly and cuts to the bone: sometimes I find myself thinking I have no use for this sort of “grown-up” noise rock any longer, but when it’s engineered this beautifully and the songs land so hard, I’m sold. Arguable highlight is “Postperfect Conditional,” where Kim takes lead vocal duties and—partly as a result of his slightly high pitch, partly via the song’s uptempo meld of riffs and scrabble—the band ends up akin to the later-career sound of the EX.