Metal Feathers
Epidural, Glamour Skulls on Haunted Beach, ZXCV
self-released
“This band is a secret,” Jay Lobley declared last year on the opening track of Metal Feathers’ third album, Handful of Fog, and they seem determined to keep it that way. The brilliant indie-rock group posted two releases on their Bandcamp page this winter and announced them sans fanfare on Facebook, to the delight of about two dozen people who noticed.
The first offering, a new EP called Epidural, deserves a much wider audience than it’s likely to attract online. In my review of Fog, I likened it to Big Star’s beautiful clusterfuck of an album, Sister Lovers. On Epidural, this trio delivers a slightly rockier version of “Nighttime,” from Sister, that’s more than worthy of the original. The other cover among the six songs here is a faithful rendition of “Raised in a Cave,” by the Boston punks Headband, with whom Metal Feathers has played a few gigs over the years. It’s little more than a knotty riff and a chorus (“Born on a mountain, raised in a cave / Partyin’ and rockin’ are all that I crave”), but true to its lyric, that’s plenty.
In a similar vein, opener “Such a Good Singer Only Need One Note” attempts to prove its titular point by refusing to stray from a single chord and tempo, and almost succeeds. “Oh, It’s Real” recalls the dreamy baroque pop of late ’60s Kinks, and “Snow Day” sounds like the druggy dub-reggae The Clash slipped into at the dawn of the ’80s, sporting the same burbling bass and tinkling bells. The EP ends with “All I Do Is I Dream All Day,” a lush, broken ballad that (to push the Big Star comparison a bit too far) would fit on Alex Chilton’s first solo release, Like Flies on Sherbert, with its stumbling instrumentation and blown vocal.
For fans who, like me, consider the first two Metal Feathers albums (Statistically Marred and Contrast Eats the Slimey Green) two of the best indie-rock records ever made in Maine, the less polished and cohesive material they’ve released more recently is kind of a letdown. But it gets worse — much worse.
In early March, a recording titled Glamour Skulls at Haunted Beach appeared on Metal Feathers’ Bandcamp page. Its title is referenced in the lyrics of “Glamour Skulls,” which begins the band’s debut album of late 2008. It’s the “sound just out of reach” behind the static on the radio dial in a town “out of reach to all frequencies.” It’s the Holy Grail of Metal Feathers’ mythology. And, we now know, it’s unremittingly awful.
Purportedly recorded in the winter of 2010-11, around the time Contrast was released, Glamour Skulls is a single track, lasting nearly 23 minutes, comprised of static, feedback, tape manipulations, vague vocals, drum banging, bass belches and assorted nightmare noises. It’s as though the patches of feedback and static artfully interspersed through the song “Glamour Skulls” have taken over an entire album. Far from being a revelatory grail, Glamour Skulls is a confounding, unmusical “fuck you” in the spirit of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
And on March 23, a three-track EP called ZXCV was posted to the Bandcamp site. It sounds like Son of Glamour Skulls, a more recently recorded sonic tantrum. Shit like this asks for, and deserves, no audience at all.
— Chris Busby
Metal Feathers plays Empire on Sat., April 12, with Awaas and Purse.
