SEATED

The Coniguliaro brothers have built up a reputation for creating highly complicated and constantly developing music. However, unlike their other band Wyxz, which leans towards in-your-face dissonance and noise, this project has more mercy for the uninitiated listener, leaning more towards the poppier, punkier side of math rock with warm, mostly undistorted guitars and a more traditional sense of tonality, which is not to say that this music goes all that easy on the ears because it usually goes off in all sorts of directions at lightning-speed and can be hard to even wrap your head around.

This album's biggest obstacle is the limitations of the band's own format as a basic guitar-bass-drums lineup: while some tracks do have accompanying keyboard and pitched percussion parts, the production sounds a mite flat and is often in danger of becoming slightly monotonous, but the band thankfully manages to mostly overcome this trapping by varying their approaches and the moods they try to tackle. Some songs sound like broken, stuttering deconstructions of indie rock songs (such as "Feet Honey" and "Leave", the latter of which has a catchy main melody and a cute jazzy outro), others sound like manic note sequences that are constantly reinventing themselves; "Buddy's Bone" is probably the highlight of the album with its very pretty main theme serving as something to hold on to amidst the knotted up chaos of muted guitar lines, expertly played by Alex Verbickas and immaculately backed up by the rhythm section. "Die Cycle" is also great, with its melodic motifs that are continually restated and further developed upon. "Sun Bubble" is probably the simplest song on the album but it's nice and has a melancholic, introspective feel to it, and "Lordlegs" distinguishes itself with its surprising vibraphone break that reminds me of Pierre Moerlen.

Most songs are very compact, clocking in at between one and three minutes: they get in and get out. Only near the end of the album does the band try to create two seven-minute quasi-suites. "Colorless Streak" starts off haunting and slow before embarking on a journey towards a heavy, driving coda with a guitar solo, a rare moment of (presumably) spontaneous improvisation in the middle of these meticulously planned-out constructions. "Sunsnap" is again more simple, going from an easy-going, slightly gloomy section in 7/8 to an incredibly triumphant coda in 3/4 (very normal time signatures by this band's standards).

Not every attempt at something different works too well. "Distilled Neutrality" is a not too interesting doom-metallish piece interrupted by some generic riffage halfway through, and "Mystic Woe" is a percussionless song centred around acoustic guitar which just sort of goes nowhere for three minutes, and feels superfluous given the inclusion of a very sweet, mellow country-ish opening to the final track "Daunting Abyss". Considering the album's overall quality however I'm willing to grant them these few missteps since they don't break the flow of the album too much anyway. This is a very enjoyable listen in addition to a stunning technical feat.