ULTRA EGO

What a gentle, beautiful, melancholic, and fascinating sound world they've launched. This album "Ultra Ego" has been released by an Oakland-based promising combo Feed Me Jack as their newest ep in the early 2016. They call themselves as math rock / indie rock band ... actually their fuzzy, jazzy, freaky play leaning towards 90s alternative / independent rock sounds slight math-y but I wonder if we could call them as a math rock act, via this whole album and their musically critical hits here and there. This ep consists of five short tracks each of which can ring my bell through their delicious but a tad bitter melody lines. They've played in this creation smoothly and delightfully with rhythmic, melodic cynics. This soundscape reminds me of the similar vein to an art rock combo Hour Of The Shipwreck and simultaneously makes me get afraid whether I can call them as so-called progressive rock. Elusive melodies and phrases flooded with kinda anacatesthesia drive me mad definitely. Anyway also this crazy funky sleeve that is cynically appealing to the fans is my favourite. Another good find for me.

If I needed to describe this album in one word: schizo, that'd be it. That's not simply good or bad and, to clarify, for the average progger it's nothing particularly weird or inaccessible. It's tasteful and you can promptly recognize there's some good shizzle here. By schizo I refer to the fragmentary, mutable aspect of the music. On one hand, it's dense and creative: a lot of melodies, weird tempos, different moods, and so on. Some instrumental passages focus on wall-of-sound textures that are so deep and pleasant, and there's where the music is at it's proggiest imo. On the other hand, everything starts and changes too fast - I feel like the ideas could be elaborated further, sometimes by simply making the passages longer. A negative aspect imo, since the songs and album are already so short. It's weird given that my issue with music tends to be the exact opposite: extended passages insisting on a single idea to the point it's bland, tiresome. And in the middle of this instrumental maestry and some nice singing there are passages that get too close to more generic indie choruses - what can I say, after all, this is not primarily prog, but this comes out as another blemish for me. Certainly going to keep an eye on the bands future releases.

A song or a some passages are 5 stars for sure, overall I'll give it 3.5 stars, rounding up to the fourth.