Spectreview: Medium Weekend – Crow Program

Medium Weekend plumb the cerebral depths of ecology in their newest project, a visual album that showcases what the experimental duo does best.

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The lineage of strange, risk-taking underground musical duos is long and storied, and Medium Weekend is no exception. Comprised of a drummer/lead vocalist and a guitarist who fills in everything else, this Seattle band has been dependably writing and performing hypnotic, emo-laced music for a few years now. Their newest project, the five-song visual album Crow Project, sees them flexing their conceptual muscles (as well as their production chops). Seeming to borrow mostly from footage of nature documentaries, the album sees the band laying down their signature instrumental workouts with a fresh context, and the results are deliciously weird.

The two tracks that name-drop famous voices in ecology, the spacy “Carl Sagan’s Enzyme Machine” and the hypnagogic “Aldo Leopold’s Biotic Enterprise,” are also the album’s best; Medium Weekend are especially talented at building an environment for the listener to nestle in, and one can imagine these particular tracks coming to life on the stage. Elsewhere, touches of hyper-tempo post-rock (on opening number “Slug Fest”), vocal manipulation (the strange beast of “Cricket”) and technical percussion polyrhythms (the brief, pensive title track) round out the proceedings. Most notably, Jak McKool’s excellent production unifies the album, drawing every ounce of power out of the recordings. It may be short, but it’s a condensed blast of everything the duo does best.

Recommended for the BPA trail.