THE SHEAVES - "A SALVE FOR INSTITUTION" LP

SDZ: This album is a dirty bomb that explodes in the face of power. The power that manipulates, the power that no longer sees anything, the power that does not want to leave. The manufacturing is artisanal. The song hangs around street corners, rubs against the walls of alienation. The guitars screech, follow, drift in a daze. This shaggy psychedelia sometimes turns, briefly, into uppercut punk. The group is there, all the time, in front of the world, dripping with the faults of the era, pushing passers-by to the margins, cracking their fascinating matches of songs with unparalleled casualness in all the alleys of the dead world. Interference in pirate radios, resistance is organized in a soggy basement, disease is the modern seum, it must be warded off in a kaleidoscopic way, by concentrating the highest doses of sonic explosives. A pinch of this mixture ingested by the Electric Prunes for their "I had too much too dream last night" (the immense shadow of this oscillating and inverted guitar and these encircling minor tones), a good dose of the lo-fi wizards of Ohio like Jim Shepard or Mike Rep or a very spicy assortment of the incomparable Swell Maps, The Fall or Half Japanese. Not to mention lots of local potions, sometimes a little stale in the desert but still just as powerful. This is the second album from this band from Phoenix, Arizona that I've been following since their first cassette - brilliantly reissued on Minimum Table Stacks - and it's a great honor to release it today