Sic Alps, U.S. EZ
Featured Album
It takes a lot of work to sound this trashy: the Sic Alps have perfected the art of stumbling into musical splendor.
Sic Alps 'third album (their debut for the mightily revitalized Siltbreeze label) is a strange, beguiling and beautiful thing. The Sic Alps are a San Francisco-based duo comprised of Mike Donovan and Matthew Hartman, both veterans of Cat Power, Coachwhips, Total Shutdown and a couple half-forgotten Slumberland indie pop acts. Among the dozens of bands lumped in with the "new lo-fi" scene, Sic Alps seem the most instantly beloved by the widest swath of nerds: punks, record collectors, indie-pop kids and noise hounds alike. Rock has always had a fetish for the "well-crafted illusion of spontaneity," as Paul Lukas once called it. Sic Alps pull off that very trick, seeming to shamble about aimlessly, then suddenly hit upon bits of musical splendor with uncanny perfection. To put it another way: it takes a lot of work to sound this trashy.
Like their Bay Area compatriots Wooden Shjips, the Alps invest potentially alienating sounds with a truckload of good vibrations. The shortness of most Alps tunes helps to make them easily digested as pop music; even their most "out" material has a chewy melodic center. When they surface from the haze to bust out with straight-ahead pure pop, as they do on the delightful, '60s-y tunes "Gelly Roll Gum Drop," "Sing Song Waitress" and "Bathman," it's awesome, and perhaps a little bit what early Guided By Voices would have sounded like on very heavy downers. During such dire economic/ spiritual/ political times as Americans and the world faces in '08, forcefully original music that acts as a salve is more important than ever.
